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FosterThomasFlag for United States of America

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Wireless Connection being dropped by some Devices/Laptops

This might be a stupid question, but I have a wireless router set up at my office, we have about 20 users.   95% of everything works perfectly.

However from time to time laptops or devices (tablets and smart phones) get the connected with limited activity exclamation mark over it.   So the signal strength is perfect but the laptop loses the internet connection.

After a restart the laptop connects perfectly again.   It doesn't seem to have a rhyme or reason to what laptop gets kicked off or a time frame.

As anyone come across this before?
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Randy Downs
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Maybe this article will help.

You could also setup an additional wi-fi or connect some of the users up to wired to eliminate some of the load from the wireless router. As convenient as Wi-Fi is it's never as fast or reliable as a wired connection.
You don't give very many specifics on brands or models, so the answer will be equally vague. Yes, I have seen this regardless of the sophistication of the technology. I just saw it happen yesterday. The way I see it, wireless networking is such an amazing technology, so complicated, I am amazed that it ever works at all.  For example, imagine an older technology 802.11g router. With a good connection, accounting for bandwidth lost to overhead, the entire text of the almost five million character King James Bible can be transferred every second without error. With newer wireless technology, it's at least 10 times as much data per second, every bit accounted for perfectly.
In your office, the router is handling 20 devices and keeping all the data straight, encrypting and decrypting all that data on the fly, constantly being aware of other nearby routers on the same channel and cooperating with them to share the bandwidth and minimize interference, and depending on the router sophistication, might be altering the data transmission uniquely for each client to maximize the data transfer speed.
On a more basic level, connecting to a wireless router has two steps, authentication --making sure the computer has the correct password to connect-- and then authorization --enabling properly-authenticated computers access to data on the network. Sometimes, something goes wrong with that second step. Sometimes there is overwhelming interference that you don't know about, but your router is fighting to overcome, and bits get lost, and your computer never gets an IP address properly assigned (a four-step process back and forth which is also quite complicated), thus it is connected to the network but not able to communicate.
You could waste a lot of time trying to figure out exactly why it is happening, or you could teach your users some simple steps to follow when it happens, and that might be adequate. The next time it happens, try this:
--Don't restart, but turn off/disable the wireless connection for a few seconds then turn it back on. Sometimes that is all that is needed. If that works on an ongoing basis, it's an easy thing to teach your users and takes just a few seconds.
--Try setting a static IP on the device in the proper subnet and then try pinging 8.8.8.8. If it works, then it's something to do with your computer not getting an IP address assigned. The reasons could be many.
--Try changing the channel on your wireless router. If only a 2.4 Ghz router, only use channels 1, 6 or 11. Get a free wireless scanner utility to see what the strongest nearby networks are using and set a different one. Consider getting a dual band router to take advantage of the additional channels to minimize the risk of interference.

Not knowing more about your setup limits what I can suggest, but I hope that helps.  Good luck.
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Sorry I should have gone more indepth but was hoping it was something easy.

It is a Linksys EA6500 router.  

I have most people just hardwire their laptops but some people can't where they site and telling the owner of the company he has to hard wire before holding a meeting in the conference room isn't an option.   Add in everyones phone and tablets and there are a lot of devices connected.

We have a windows server 2012 set up, in which DCHP is used for our computers through there.   I tried to set up the router to simply be an access point but it still uses it's own IP range.  Our internal is 10.xx but the router is on 1.xx so that maybe the problem, however our old router was the same way and we had no issues whatsoever, however an electric shock took care of that router so it isn't working, and I had to buy a new one.

On the laptops that lose connection, simply disconnecting the wireless connection and reconnecting doesn't work, nor does turning off the wireless card and turning it back on.  For some reason only a restart will do it.

I can't find a setting, like maybe only certain amount of devices can be connected?   and it allows the other to connect but then takes away it's internet signal.   Then a restart puts them back in first of line and kicks another device off?
As long as you have one hardwired connection in the conference room, you could easily add a switch to provide some hard wired connections. That's an easy solution even if has the down side of cluttering up the space with wires.

I suspect that your issue is multiple devices requesting the same ip. WAP is primarily used to extend the range so doesn't help in that regard. If you had wired connection via switch or another router then you would have additional ips.

Static ips as mentioned above should also work but that requires setting up each device. You could try it on a couple of devices to see if that's a good solution for you. make sure that the static ips you assign are outside the range of ips handed out by DHCP.
That's not an answer the boss is going to accept, he doesn't think in IT terms.   His answer, being from Maryland near Under Armour factory.   "I bet at UA they don't have wires every where during a meeting" and I see his logic.    When we have clients come in, or new employees rotating frequently using difference machines Static IP is not an easy answer, as I am the only IT person on staff, and my time is hard enough to come by with all the projects I get handed down.

I agree hard wired always is the way to go, but it's just not an option in some cases.   What do bigger companies do when they use wireless?  They have 100's of employees there has to be a way to manage that many users on wireless.
My suggestion is to add at least one other Wi-FI router and have one group use it exclusively (i.e., remove the connection for the existing router). If you have a set of users that have the most difficulty with the existing setup move them to the new router. If your old router was a different model you may want to try getting that as the 2nd router.

Bigger companies have multiple Wi-Fi routers dispersed throughout the building and you connect to the one with  the best strength or your designated group router.

Multiple routers hand out their own ips (e.g. 192.168.1.xxx, 192.168.2.xxx, ...).
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FosterThomas
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Doing my own research I found to try setting it up as an access point