I recently ran into an iPad 2 issue I hadn’t encountered before: not being able to connect to a wireless network! I’ve had an iPad 2 since its first release and haven’t had a single issue yet! This is the best gadget I have ever owned.
Anyway, I set up a new wireless network in my home and I tried to connect but got the message:
Unable to connect to network [network name]
I made sure my iPad 2 is running the latest version of iOS, now it’s 9.x. I went ahead and also tested connecting to a new wireless network using a laptop and it worked fine. So there were definitely no problems with the router.
My first thought was the iPad 2 can’t connect because I have configured WPA2-PSK security with AES encryption. I went ahead and quickly changed the security of my wireless router to WPA with TKIP and iPad 2 connected !! It was great, but I was still surprised that iPad 2 does not support WPA2.
After doing a little research, I found that the iPad 2 does support WPA2 and TKIP / AES encryption. So I changed the security of the wireless router again, but still couldn’t connect! It’s a shame, to put it mildly!
After a while, I decided to try resetting all settings. In the end I found an option to only reset the network settings.
After resetting network settings, I was able to connect my iPad 2 to the WPA2-PSK AES network! Not sure why I had to reset the settings, but for some reason it helped.
Reset network settings on iPad
You can do this on your iPad 2 by first going to Settings and then clicking General.
Scroll all the way down and you will see the Reset option. Click on this and you will see the following options:
Go ahead and tap the “Reset Network Settings” option and you should be fine! Turn Wi-Fi back on and try connecting to the problem wireless network.
Hope you can connect now without any problem. If you have any problems, please leave a comment here and I will try to help! Enjoy!
–