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AT&T U-Verse Wireless Connection Problem with Apple Devices

I have been using AT&T U-verse since last year. It has been better than AT&T DSL service which I used prior to U-verse. But sometimes the internet connection was not successful from only my Apple devices. Actually the fact that the problem is only from Apple devices was known to me quite lately. My son is using a Windows laptop. I found out that he never complained about his connection. I am not sure that my wired connection was also problematic since I didn’t check it because most of my networked devices are wireless.

I asked AT&T technical support to help me. They  were very kind and eager to solve my problem. After listening to my problem, the technical support changed my modem settings. I believed it helped since I didn’t have the disconnection problem anymore. But another problem, maybe more serious one arose. Network speed got seriously slow down. I called again AT&T technical support. All they said was that my modem and wire were OK. The technical support asked me to cold-reset my modem. So I did. The speed came back to normal. I believed that it helped and solved the problem. But it was not. The network speed got slow down again after a while.

I had decided to solve this problem by myself and checked out some relevant articles from the Internet. Many complaints existed here and there. But there were not many clear answers for the problem. So, my second approach was to check out my son’s Windows laptop which was getting network connection even though all my Apple devices weren’t. I found out the laptop’s wireless setting was using WPA-Personal as the wireless security. So I changed the security setting of my MacBook Pro’s AirPort. It didn’t solve the problem. I googled one more time. And I found an interesting answer for this disconnection problem. The guy said that the modem’s wireless setting should be changed.

I figured out that Apple’s AirPort Security settings have missing compared to Windows wireless settings. Among authentication types of WPA and WPA2, we can choose either TKIP or AES in the Windows settings but not in the AirPort settings. I suspected that Apple devices do not support one of types. The default setting of the U-verse modem is  “WPA-PSK (TKIP) and WPA2-PSK (AES).” I selected “WPA2-PSK (AES)” “WPA-PSK(TKIP)” instead of the default setting and clicked the ‘save’ button. This solved my wireless connection problem of my Apple devices without sacrificing network speed.

Here is a short version of what I did to solve my problem.

  1. Start a web browser. Go http://192.168.1.254
  2. Click the “Wireless” icon on the “Home” screen or select the “Settings” tab –> LAN –> Wireless. Either can bring you to the same setting page.
  3. Scroll down to the Security section.
  4. Select “WPA2-PSK (AES)” “WPA-PSK(TKIP)” in the Authentication Type.
Then, you may change your Windows Wireless settings to use WPA2-PSK (AES) WPA-PSK(TKIP) on your Windows machines if it is selected with (TKIP) something else.