[edit: this story has a mostly happy ending. my 8320's wifi, it turns out, is all that.]

Here's the short version: I love my 8320, but the wifi is a joke in its present state. I'm looking for suggestions and opinions about whether I have a defective 8320, or whether there's anything I can do about poor performance.

The longer version? Same story I've read from others about UMA not working. If "mobile network" is enabled, no UMA call lasts more than 20 seconds without switching over to the GSM network. And with GSM disabled, I get varied (and unacceptable) results, but usually the call has alternating periods of silence on one end or another. This evening I tried the same test at starbucks, and at my mother in law's house, and got the same results. During one test yesterday I was able to get a few minutes of reliability out of a UMA call, but sadly that was the exception that seems to be proving the rule.

Even if there were no wifi on this handset it would be the best cellphone I've ever owned. But the box says wifi, and so I want it to work: I want fast browsing and I want UMA.

What other diagnostic methods are available? Are there T-Mo servers I can ping or site statistics I can check? How on earth can I figure out where the trouble is? Would it be any use to call T-Mo for help? Do I have a defective unit?

Below, proof that my network is OK. First, here's the bandwidth usage reported by my router when I visited a page here from my BB, not 5 feet from the router. During this test my 8320 reported full signal strength. Note the prolonged, sporadic download, at speeds less than those advertised for EDGE:



Next, my MacBook, downloading the same page via wifi, through two walls and about 30 feet:



Then a little showing off: downloading a big file from a fast server using wifi on my MacBook:



Finally a little confirmation from VoIP Providers - VoIP Services - Broadband Phone Company Providers that my latency is OK:



What to do?

Reset your 8320. I had to do this also ... from what T-Mobile said, some devices have incorrect security and this clears it up. I didn't believe it until the tech, who I started to trust, told me this. He confirmed with the onsite BB rep.

Backup the unit first. Afterwards, go to the security options, general, menu - wipe handheld.

After a reboot, it will sync the service profiles and then if you are a BES user, it automatically re-registers and starts to sync. That are the steps I remember

Good luck.

Router, settings ect???

Most, if not all, are having issues because they are using older routers or routers with old firmware...

Get a T-Mobile router (D-Link or Linksys) as it's free after the mail in rebate...

Kris

Ok. Wiped the 8320 and got good UMA performance on my generic router. We'll see how it looks after BES activation.

ok if i have the 8320 for me to have the wifi enabled, do i need to buy the router??? i keep hearing about everyone buying a router from TMO well i have a linkis router would that be enough, even tho im already using it for my pc's and laptop???? Thanks

Standard Routers should work but it depends on how old, what type, if the firmware is up to date, and if all the settings are correct.

After activation it was hosed again. There's a RIM help page that says if you upgraded you have to make sure the two T-Mo certificates are installed. This implies that without the certs, you'll get no UMA connection whatsoever, and I'm getting intermittent performance (and the certs are there). So something else was wrong, and it was coming from my BES server. I checked Options -> Advanced -> TCP and found APN blank. So I put in "wap.voicestream.com", left the user and pass blank, and pulled the battery. VOILA!

I've attached bandwidth profiles for a good UMA call (before BES activation, alternating sending and receiving as one party or the other talks, consistent speeds) and a bad UMA call (both sending and receiving are dropping out every few seconds). After I fixed my APN, pulled the battery (just for laughs) and tried again, my UMA call looked like the "before activation" picture.

Well THAT is a relief.

As Lunk and others mentioned, the older routers seem to be a stumbling block for a lot of people, which sort of makes sense. This device is using newer technology which may stress parts of the specs that older firmware/routers are lax about, or possibly implemented incorrectly.

Corollary: a project at work required that we find a cheap router *without* wifi that was UPnP capable -- we went through... wow, probably 15 routers of varying forms before we finally found one that the UPnP actually *worked* correctly. All these devices advertised UPnP capability but they all screwed up the implementation itself and were useless.

Regarding your bandwidth tests, I learned something new that posted in another thread. If you turn on WiFi and use the *Internet Browser* on the device, all your traffic is routed through blackberry.net proxies via WiFi. Yup, all of it. So what you need to do to get a more standardized, rational test is to make a Browser Bookmark as WiFi Browser or set the default Browser to WiFi - a forced WiFi bookmark does *not* proxy - then make sure to visit http://www.checkmyip.com/ from both the desktop browser and the BB browser to ensure the IPs match up. If you see the BB IP starting with 216.9.250.* then you're proxying over blackberry.net still.

Could this be what caused BoyGenius' test to show the same (slower almost) speed for wifi than EDGE.

I might highly suspect that's the case -- in my (highly informal) testing my browsing is definitely slower when it's using the blackberry.net proxies, i.e. default mode. If I flip to a forced WiFi things are way snappier depending... (I'm sure at 3am when nobody is using "the internets" it might be the same, you know)

Nuts. I'm getting an IP assigned to my employer, even when I force wifi. This explains why I get sporadic failures to reach a server inside my home LAN. How can I override this?

Forcing WiFi browsing (or whatever we'll call it) is the only way I've discovered so far, but I'm on BIS not BES like you. :-/ Keep beating on all the options - like try turning off all of GSM *then* turning on WiFi and stuff, just random variations. Perhaps we'll stumble onto some combination of factors that will force a BES connection to not proxy - I'm afraid I can't help not having/using BES.

I had a thought -- do you have any control over your BES? I maintain the caching proxy server at work and write the AutoConfig (PAC) file; if you can somehow get your BES to return 'DIRECT' mode (or whatever the BB equiv. is) back to a proxy config request from the device, you might be in business...maybe.

(I've never even seen a BES so run with the idea in the proper parlance...)

Me neither. And the company I work for is large. VERY large. And the 8320 isn't approved on their network. So I'm inclined to look at calling the BES guys as a very last resort, lest they be forced to pry this phone out of my cold, dead fingers...

Most strange. Here's what I just did. I added a bookmark for checkmyip, and made the bookmark a wifi bookmark. Then I visited the bookmark, got my corporate IP. It was in the BB's cache. Then I hit R to reload, and got my home address!

This tells me that when you hit G in the browser, enter an address, use the menu to switch to the wifi browser, that this is an unreliable method for getting it to do what we want. (By the way, this whole evening, I've had GSM turned off. We're routing BES traffic through wifi.)

Here's the newest question: what are the available methods for forcing a wifi connection? It seems that using a wifi bookmark is the best approach so far. My applications list has "Browser" and "T-Zones" but no "Internet Browser" or "BlackBerry Browser."

As an IT type dude, might I recommend bringing them a plate of homemade chocolate chip cookies? Cookies man, they go a long way with your average geek...never underestimate social engineering.

"Internet Browser" and "WiFi Browser" are not app links, they're config options. Open the Browser, Menu -> Options -> General Properties. Set the Default Browser to WiFi and see how that works out for you.

note: when set this way the BB will *not* fall back to GSM browsing when WiFi disappears - you'll have to set it back to Internet Browser in order to get GSM love back. See this thread here:

http://www.blackberryforums.com/wifi...berry-net.html

Sweet. I have achieved 8320 nirvana.

im not savy enough to follow all of the ways people have stated they could maximize wifi.
can someone summarize it, please??

edit

Yes. Here's a summary of my state before the fix:

• Phone is in UMA mode
• Upgraded from 8700
• Corporate BES user
• Can send and receive calls, but within a few seconds it always reverts back to GSM/EDGE, and there's always a several-second dropout in the meantime
• If I disable GSM/EDGE and stick with UMA, I get many dropped calls, and lots of audio dropouts, making the phone useless
• Wifi performance is nowhere near what I expected

The theory (which I think is true) is that my UMA traffic was routing from my wifi through my corporation's BES server and all my company's routers, filters, packet shapers and who knows what else. The theory further goes that adding the APN forced this traffic to use public routers on the way to T-Mobile.

Also note that to get improved Wifi performance, I had to use rivviepop's suggestion just above, to force the browser to rely on a true wifi connection. Otherwise, my wifi browsing traffic was going through my company's infrastructure, and that is something I was able to prove with checkmyip.

edit

Thanks for the above info. I "forced" the wifi connection, checked the ip, which was the same as my desktop, also had apn set already, UMA has been working fine, did a battery pull but my wifi (with optimal network conditions) is still slower than EDGE. Any recommendations? Thanks. (I am also on a BES with exchangemymail)

I think alot of people are forgetting that on EDGE you are getting alot compression from the BB servers, with wifi its the raw data being converted. compression makes alot things go faster

Yes. I think there's a CPU bottleneck as well: loading a big page with lots of images takes some rendering time. I can load MP3 and video files at up to 700 kbps, but I rarely see spikes over 300kbps when downloading web pages.

I just stuck a simple PHP script on my home apache, the BB devices accept gzip and deflate compression surprisingly. Here are the interesting bits:

HTTP_HOST
192.168.1.100

HTTP_CONNECTION
keep-alive

HTTP_USER_AGENT
BlackBerry8320/4.2.2 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/100

HTTP_ACCEPT
text/html,
application/xhtml+xml,
application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml,
application/vnd.wap.wmlc;q=0.9,
application/vnd.wap.wmlscriptc;q=0.7,
text/vnd.wap.wml;q=0.7,
text/vnd.sun.j2me.app-descriptor,*/*;q=0.5

HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET
ISO-8859-1,
UTF-8,
US-ASCII,
UTF-16BE,
windows-1252,
UTF-16LE,
windows-1250

HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE
en-US,en;q=0.5

HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING
gzip,deflate

HTTP_X_WAP_PROFILE
"http://www.blackberry.net/go/mobile/profiles/uaprof/8320/4.2.2.rdf"

If you have a modern Apache >=2.0.45, you can ensure your gzip/deflate is active with a logic block like the following:

so basically just reset the Curve, enter the wap settings (wap.voicestream.com), pull battery, and voila, it should work as it should? I only get 1-2 bars whether near my router or up two floors and even up two floors it stays for a few seconds then switches back over to EDGE ...
can someone confirm this method?^^

Seems to have worked for me. I have my Curve set to prefer wifi, and a) calls stay on UMA even with one bar of reception, and b) transition to EDGE when I walk up my street is seamless.

I shall try this in a little bit then. Thanks!

Still same weak UMA signal in my room :(
Must be the router or it could be the phone.

There's still something wrong. Here's a bandwidth profile downloading an MP3 from a local server inside my LAN. This periodicity is exactly the same thing I saw during failed UMA calls, but UMA seems to be doing OK.

Grunt, grumble. Any other suggestions?

too many issues?

Yes. Now I'm fighting with Comcast 'cause I see lots of dropped packets on one of the routers between me and the intertubes...but that doesn't explain my latest bb wifi issue.

This is on again, off again. Today I'm on again. I have been on a conference call for the last 90 minutes. The first 60 minutes were through my home router over UMA. Then I left the house to take my son to school. Transfer to EDGE was flawless. Now I'm back and transferred flawlessly back to UMA. And just to push my luck, I opened the browser during the call and downloaded an MP3 off the internet at 43 KB per second.

edit

Seems so. They found a couple of corroded connectors, but before they did that they proved that the connection from my house to their plant was bulletproof, 20Mbps, no dropped packets. So it's the same old "I'm a cable customer, and my network performance is inversely proportional to the activities of my neighbors" story. :-/