As many of you are aware BlackBerry has been having some issues with Wi-Fi connectivity on BlackBerry 10 devices and honestly, it’s becoming a major issue to a lot of folks. Not only is it bad that we are losing our Wi-Fi capabilities but it could potentially cost someone a serious cash output to their carrier if they don’t notice the connection issue while streaming a movie or downloading a big file in time.
I’m sure there are some of you that have no idea what I’m talking about so here’s a quick rundown for you. There are times I’m at home (or somewhere else I use Wi-Fi) and I know I’m connected to Wi-Fi but all of a sudden I will receive a Hub message stating “this network appears to have limited internet access as some websites are unreachable”. Normally when I see this all I have to do is turn on, then off, airplane mode and my BlackBerry will re-connect to the intended Wi-Fi connection, which allows me to get right back to whatever I was working on.
Well twice in the last couple weeks that work-around wouldn’t work, which meant the only way for me to connect to my Wi-Fi again was to turn off the carrier data and leave it off during the outage. It seems that during these times the issue wasn’t with just me but in fact was a world wide problem possibly caused by all the BlackBerry sites being down at once. For some reason our BlackBerry 10 devices need to “phone home” to the BlackBerry servers and then as long as that goes well the Wi-Fi connection will stay connected properly. The major drawback to this plan though is if the BlackBerry servers are having problems it may in turn cause issues with Wi-Fi connections to the end users.
Now to be quite honest I’m not very tech savvy when it comes to issues like this but I do know, no matter what the problem is, me losing my Wi-Fi connection flat-out sucks. This is a major company and for them to continually have problems keeping my device connected to Wi-Fi is just plain unacceptable. Luckily it hasn’t caused me any real life issues, but I’m sure not everyone is as lucky. Also, before all the “BlackBerry can do no wrong” folks blast me I do understand things happen from time to time to every company, but why does it always seem to be a BlackBerry problem?
In fairness to BlackBerry it does appear they are aware of the issue because earlier today Michael sent me a screen shot of a post Michael Clewley made on his BBM channel concerning all of this. Here’s what he had to say.
Changes have been made to BlackBerry OS 10.3 will address the situation meanwhile measures have been put in place to help prior to the full solution.
Since I do respect Michael Clewley I will take him at his word that BlackBerry has a fix in the works and hopefully this issue will be solved in the upcoming OS updates. At least BlackBerry has finally addressed the end users that they are aware of the problem and are working hard on it so I guess only time will tell.
Since I don’t have any inside source at BlackBerry all this is just my personal opinion as to why my BlackBerry device keeps dropping its Wi-Fi connection. If any of you have a different opinion or thoughts on the matter be sure to hit up the comments and chime in. There is one thing I’m positive we all can agree on though, this issue needs to be resolved now.