Connectivity Troubleshooting Tips

So today I went to my brother’s home to troubleshoot an issue he had where he tried to connect his android phone to his wifi at home.  He mentioned to me that for some reason or other he was just not able to.  What I saw was that when trying to connect to the router, you were able to enter the password but no IP address was being given out and the android phone just kept on trying again and again (like a good sport) to get an IP address!

My immediate thought was that there was something wrong with the phone and not the router as he had other devices (laptop, iphone, ipod, etc) connecting without any problems.  After a few minutes of troubleshooting the phone my instincts had me go and do a google search to see what the problem could be.  The searches were pointing me to steps that I knew just didn’t apply to this situation.  I knew that if I followed these suggestions, I would be led to a number of dead ends!

I stood back and decided to see this problem from a different point of view.  Was there anything in the configuration of the router that could be causing this?  Looking thru the configuration of the router I found the culprit, when I set this router for him I configured the router to only give out 10 IP address as I thought that this would be enough for his needs.  I increased this limit and whala!  issue resolved!  The curious side in me wanted to know more about why this was happening but because of time constraints (and the fact that I was hungry) I didn’t continue troubleshooting this further.

The moral of the story is first and foremost, don’t think that the worse case scenario applies to the current situation (this will only lead to unnecessary panic).  In this case, the google searches were leading me to the conclusion that my brother’s android phone had some serious issues with it’s wireless connectivity.  Look at the big picture first, and see if this helps out with trying to isolate the component(s) that could be causing the issue.  In my case, I started out with the phone’s wireless feature and knew this was not the issue as this phone had worked at my home.  Then I focused on the router itself and found the issue pretty quickly!  So, in conclusion don’t think the worst of things until you have eliminated all other possible causes of whatever issue(s) you are experiencing!