Hi all,

Firstly, I have seen this problem in other threads, if you have this problem feel free to skip the preamble here and test out the workaround below.

I've had my Nokia a few weeks now, but since I was moving house this is the first oppertunity I've had to test the wlan functionality.

I have the problem where under normal circumstances the wlan connection to my home router is dropping in a few seconds, to a few minutes. The longest I have seen a connection last is 2 or 3 minutes. The AP is configured to run in g mode with a WPA PSK.

Now I don't believe this is due to a poor antenna in the machine because I don't have a problem connecting, or using it, at a distance from the AP. The problem is that at some point shortly after data has been transfered the connection drops.

I've read threads on this site and other sites where other people have the same problem as I was having, but I haven't seen any fixes there. This is really a deal-breaker for me as I bought the 770 for on-call service, and decent SSH connections are essential to me so I can fix servers from the, erm, comfort of my bed at 3:30am

Workaround

I don't have a fix for this but I have a workaround that works for me at least, it woud be good if others can try it, and maybe we can come up with a better solution.

It seems there are a few networking problems for the 770, but if your 770 works fine on a b network without WPA/WEP, and it doesn't work on a g network with WPA then I believe there is a good chance this will work for you.

Please note you will have needed to install xterm for this.

On my home network I have my laptop running constantly and I had the idea to ping the 770 to keep the connection open. After I connect the 770 to the network I get the ip-address associated with wlan0 by running /sbin/ifconfig on a xterm, then from my laptop I ping that ip-address constantly every second.

So far this has stopped the disconnection problems for me, YMMV.

Discussion

Given that it works, this is not really what I would call a "robust" solution! For one thing you need a second PC on the network. This can be avoided if there was a ping command available on the 770, but i have not been able to find one. I'm sure there is a package with ping in it out there (can someone give me a pointer) or else it should be easy to build one. When we have this it shoud be simple to have the 770 ping an external address (google.com for example) instead of needing a second machine to ping the 770.

It seems the real problem is (and this is of course an educated guess rather than fact) that at some point the 770 mistakenly detects that the network has lost the connection and resets the ip settings for the wlan connection. It seems to me that this may be caused by some scheduling problem since it only occurs when there is no data being sent (and hence the thread is probably inactive). It also seems to happen in the vast majority of cases to people using g networks and WPA keys. Judging by the posts, I suspect the WPA is more of a problem than the g network.

The obvious solution would be to stop the reseting of the ip settings unless we are really getting failures in sending data, not sure how easy this woud be to do or even if the source is open to do this. The second solution would be fixing the software that detects the broken wlan connection, again I haven't looked into this yet. I don't want to do the work until I am sure no one else has fixed the problem.

Cheers, havok.