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Help Bionic Wifi connectivity Issue: Gets IP address but no internet

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paulneworleans

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For months now, I've had issues connecting to my router from my Droid Bionic. It sees my SSID, connects okay, gets an IP address, but will not connect to the internet. I tried everything to fix this to no avail including Hard Reset of phone and router, replacing phone and router as well as three 2-hour calls with verizon tech support (tier 2).

Well I'm posting now to say: Problem Solved!!!!

It was simply this: The USB Port on the Bionic (as well as a few other devices) is bound to an IP address (192.168.20.1) and cannot be changed. You can see where this is going...

My router was set to the same gateway 192.168.20.1 and this caused a conflict in the phone. The solution was to change my router to a different address and now everything works!!

I hope this helps someone else, because it took me alot of time to find this out. I also notified Verizon Tech support so they are now aware of the issue.

Good Luck!!
 
Thanks for posting this. It's a pretty obscure issue - most routers are set to 192.168.0.x, 192.168.1.x, or 10.0.0.x. But that's one more thing I'll file away when one of these issues pops up.

The hard part, though, is that you cannot control a public hotspot or corporate WiFi router that may use this address space.
 
It is an obscure issue, but I'm not sure if other devices set the IP address of the USB port to something more common. To be honest, I've never confirmed that the USB port really does assign an IP address at all. I got that information from a Verizon Wireless forum.

I do know that once I changed my router address, all was well.:D

As for connecting to a public location that you have no control over, at least you'll know what the problem is if you get assigned an IP address of 192.168.20.x.
 
I don't follow.

I just tethered my Bionic to my laptop via the USB cable. The laptop got an IP address 192.168.42.154. It shows that its gateway, DHCP server, etc. is 192.168.42.129. Isn't that the IP address of the USB port on the Bionic?

(My Wi-Fi network is on the 192.168.0 subnet.)

Is there a way to see its IP addresses (internal and external) from the phone itself?
 
Fulltime Traveler said:
I don't follow.

I just tethered my Bionic to my laptop via the USB cable. The laptop got an IP address 192.168.42.154. It shows that its gateway, DHCP server, etc. is 192.168.42.129. Isn't that the IP address of the USB port on the Bionic?

(My Wi-Fi network is on the 192.168.0 subnet.)

Is there a way to see its IP addresses (internal and external) from the phone itself?
Click to expand...

If your wifi network was also 192.168.42.x it could be a problem. Because the network part of the ip address (the first three numbers in the dotted quad) was the same, the phone would not know whether to send traffic to the wifi adapter or to the usb adapter, and outbound traffic may get sent to the wrong interface - traffic meant to go to your computer via the USB adapter may get sent over wifi or vice versa.
 
tcp/ip layers are routable over usb. That is how you can tether network conenctions over usb. linux/android is no different. It probably (does according to your great discovery) has the usb port assigned statically in the iptables. When you tether your laptop via sub to the phone, a host app such as pdanet acts as a DHCP server and assigns the laptop an ip from it's internal pool. Assuming you are not in a crazy adhoc mode, the iptables in the phone are updated to route traffic from the cell connection over the internal usb static ip to the laptop.

So the same sort of thing happens on wifi. You have two interfaces on the same subnet that have different gateways and the phone can't route properly. It will likely choose the usb port because a static/permanent ip is higher priority on the iptable list. In your case not only were the subnets the same but also the actual ip.
 
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