Got a nook color for Christmas and naturally wanted to root it and turn it into an android tablet. The rooting process was pretty easy but I was experiencing all sorts of weird lockup and timeout issues with apps and surfing the web. Many hours spent searching forums later I found the fix. Here were the symptoms I experienced:
Facebook app would take forever to load
Youtube videos would play for maybe 10 seconds then buffer indefinitely
web surfing would time out
email would not sync
I would randomly seem to lose my wifi connection, or the indicator would turn white which means I'm connected to the network but it can't connect to google.
I could ping the IP my router assigned the NC but it was dropping 80+% of the packets
Things I did during troubleshooting:
Downloaded wifi analyser app to monitor my wireless signal and channels. No apparent conflicts with channels of other AP's in my neighborhood, signal was strong.
downloaded the speedtest.net app to try generating some non-http/youtube traffic to pin point if this was a web browsing/streaming video issue or a network issue in general. this app suffered disconnects as well when I started having trouble with the others. Oddly when I was running a speed test successfully the ping I had going to the nook responded 100% successful. As soon as the speed test was complete packets continued to drop as before.
Some forums suggested the following which didn't seem to make a difference in my case:
make sure the host name of the NC contains no special characters like - or %
Turn off AES encryption
create a DHCP reservation for the NC
The issue for me seemed to be a feature on my router called WMM. I have a netgear WGR614V7 with firmware 2.0.30_2.0.30NA. I didn't try checking for new firmware since turning off WMM made pings return to normal from the NC. I could then stream youtube on HQ and everything else returned to normal as well. The WMM setting was found under Advanced -> wireless settings, set it to disable. I suspect the CM7.1.0 encore build I'm using doesn't support WMM.
WMM (Wireless Multimedia) is a subset of the 802.11e standard. WMM allows wireless traffic to have a range of priorities, depending on the kind of data. Time-dependent information, like video or audio, will have a higher priority than normal traffic. For WMM to function correctly, Wireless clients must also support WMM.
I didn't notice any issues on my network with playing multimedia on my laptop or using netflix with this disabled so I have no problem leaving it off for the time being.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
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