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Help Help connecting to home wifi that uses static IP

E

ewk0709

Lurker
Hi all, sorry to impose on you with a tech support issue right off the bat, but I'm unable to connect my phone to my home wifi no matter what I try.

Quick specs:
Comcast Business Internet with static ip address (was provided by my new apartment)
Motorola Surfboard Wireless Cable Modem & Gigabit Router SBG6580
Samsung Galaxy Note 3, Lollipop (not rooted)

I've used both this router and this phone together for two years with no issues at all. The phone has never had issues with wifi, I always just input the password and it connects. As recently as last week I was using it in my former apartment, so I don't think it's a software update issue.

But with my current setup, I'm able to connect to wifi (the status will show as "connected") but will not be able to use the internet at all on my phone.

Things I've tried, sometimes all at the same time:
1. Resetting router (resetting with the pinhole button or unplugging/replugging)
2. Restarting my home computer
3. Restarting my phone / doing a battery pull
4. Turning wifi off and on
5. Turning mobile data off and on
6. Turning Smart Wi-Fi off and on (it is now off)
7. Forgetting my home network and rejoining, trying out different numbers in the configuration. I feel like my problem is really in this area because I basically have no idea what I'm doing, since I've never used static ip before and never had to mess with these settings. I've tried plugging in the numbers Comcast gave me (IP address, default gateway, DNS 1 & 2), tried changing the DNS numbers to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, tried changing the IP address to my computer's IP address (this actually sometimes works, but only for a couple of minutes). These are all just random suggestions I got off the internet.
8. Specifically allowing my phone's MAC address in the router setup. Pretty sure this does nothing, because my router was always set to allowing everything.
9. Looking at wireless channels using Wifi Analyzer. This did tell me that my channel was pretty crowded (but the router indicated the interference was acceptable), but when I changed the channel my internet wouldn't work at all, so I switched back to the default.

SOMETIMES after connecting, my phone will give me a message about being connected to a wi-fi network but with no internet service. I can't remember what causes this message to appear. Whether it appears or not, my phone won't work with my home wifi.

I've also tried sharing my computer wifi with my phone, but I haven't gotten that to work yet either.

Thank you for any insight! It's not so much a nuisance because the wifi on my computer works, but I just don't understand why this is happening.
 
The crowded channel being "acceptable" to the router doesn't mean a lot - the further you get from the router, the worse it is for attached devices.

That nothing else could see the changed channel is cause for concern - that's not ok at all. If it were me, I'd be looking very closely at that.

Next up, our old friends - IPv4 vs IPv6 addressing. If your router is now on IPv6, that's a known issue, change it.

Included in that comes class B vs class C.

If the router address begins with 192, it's class C and you're fine there. If it begins with 10, that's class B, ridiculous for a home networking and all of the bitmasks are messed up on the phone.

Either change the router address to begin with 192.168 or the netmasks on the phone. I'd change the router.
 
Hi, thanks for your help. You can tell that I don't know a lot about networking, but I went over your suggestions one by one to the extent that I am capable:

1. The good news is that moving closer to the router (I feel dumb that I didn't think of this before) seems to help my phone's wireless get connected. The problem is having it stay connected. I have no idea why it's so unstable -- it's especially notable when I play games that require a network connection. I'm getting dropped every 30 seconds or so.

2. I'm really hesitant to mess with the channel settings again (or anything at all really) because it seems like whenever I do so I lose my computer's wireless connection, and then I lose my only way to troubleshoot the issue.

3. I don't know whether my router is on IPv4 or IPv6. I poked around the settings but I couldn't find anything or how to change it. It's probably just displayed in a way I don't understand.

4. I guess my router address starts out at 192 (the standard 192.168.0.1 right?) but once it's connected to Comcast the address starts with 10. So then how do I fix this issue? Can I? What does it mean for bitmasks to be messed up? How do I change the netmasks? Is this related to the "subnet mask number"?
 
OK, so you probably have two problems.

If you get connectivity moving closer to the router, even if it still drops, that's a crowded channel issue.

Not sure why your pc wasn't ok with it, assume you tried reboot yeah?

Anyway - let's come back to that later, or let someone else chime in.

Your other problem is that change to 10 thing. That's something that you can fix on your phone if you don't want to muck around with the router.

The instructions are going to sound weird, I'm sorry about that - so I'm going to add a series of pictures from my phone.

Yours won't look like mine, different model, but if you're patient and just look around in your settings as you go along, you're probably going to find the same options.

Here we go.

Go sit right next to your router, get connected, stay there until done.

Get into your wifi settings, you'll see your router's name listed when you're in the right place - long press and choose edit or modify or like that.

1439141364363.jpg

Scroll in tiny window until you can see the advanced options - turn it on - and you can scroll some more in that tiny window.

1439141517199.jpg

Scroll down to DHCP, either a button or a check box (mine is a button) - get to it so you can choose static.

1439141611744.jpg

1439141629022.jpg

Now scroll down and find three things - your ip address, the router (aka gateway) address and {either the subnet mask or network prefix length, they're the same thing said two different ways}.

If your ip address and your router's ip address begins with 192, hit cancel, let me know.

If it begins with 10 -

And the network prefix length is 16 - or instead, there's a network mask that says 255.255.0.0, hit cancel, let me know.

Otherwise -

Make the last number in your ip address 100. (In the sample picture below, mine is 16 - that's what you will change to 100.)

If it has a network prefix length of 24, change it to 16.

If it has instead a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 change it 255.255.0.0

255.255.255.0 = 24
255.255.0.0 = 16

1439141994234.jpg

1439142012962.jpg

Hit save, reboot router, reboot phone while router reboots.

If phone doesn't connect next to router, go back through the steps, turn DHCP back on, save, reboot.

If it does connect, go ahead and move away from the router, let me know if anything improves.
 
OK well, this is terrible (but good for me) because everything seems to be working for me all of a sudden, before I've even tried your steps. I'm not sure if any of the following was the reason: I think I tried something today that I hadn't tried before, which was entering the router address (10.1.10.1) that I see in my computer into the "Gateway" field of the phone wifi configuration. Previously, I think I was entering the 50.xxx.xx.xx number that Comcast provided to me (this is still the entry I have in my router settings). The other thing I also did was turn WPA PSK back on in the router settings, and disable the guest network (I had previously changed these settings when I was trying to fix my wifi). Now wifi is running smoothly on my phone. I have no idea if this is temporary -- I will let you know if that is the case. Do you think I should still follow your steps? Is that something I should try the next time my wifi stops working?
 
I checked my phone, and it appears that my network prefix length is 24 (Comcast gave me a subnet mask # of 255.255.255.240). Everything is still working smoothly -- should I change that? Thank you for all your help!! I really appreciate you taking the time to type out everything. (PS: Cowboy Bebop is awesome.)
 
/facepalm

That's a network prefix length of 28 - and Comcast did that to enforce that you'd have no more than 28 possible device addresses in your home. Honestly, that's more marketing than networking.

If it's working ok, I wouldn't bother being OCD and changing it, 24 is close enough.

If it gets weird, change it to 28 - and your max safe high address for the last value is 30 (my example of 100 wouldn't have been right).

Rather than worry about it, just bookmark this page for future reference, but I doubt if you'll need it.
 
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Same problem here with my note 2.
How should I configure my phone please.. Help me?

Here is my screenshot: (sorry for Turkish)
c808e4ff3dc533f19ee7abbc3cc4660c.jpg
 
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Swipe left or right to see various screens in Wifi Analyzer.

You want the one shown below.

I'm on seh - you can see that I'm on my own wifi channel, not crowded in and sharing a channel with the neighbors.

Here's a good example of channel 1 being crowded.

1372103240009-jpg.56648
 
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