Did a trouble call this morning and the complaint was that the two iphone, two ipads, and laptop batteries drain extremely quick. Laptop was lasting about an hour, iphone and ipads were lasting about 3 hours. When the clients take their devices out fo the house, they work fine. when they go out of town, the work fine. when they get home, everything drains quickly.

What I found was packet loss, and .1 speed. Turns out the modem was bad. After talking to the Road Runner guys, he said he had seen this before. The low speed causes the processor int he wifi cards to constantly work. for example, if you have your iphone/ipad set to check for mail every 15 minutes,and the speed is only .1, its going to be constantly working at such a slow speed, by the time it gets all of you emails downloaded, it 15 minutes passed and does it again, and again. Especially for people working, or having their email open, it would drain their battery. The client emailed me a few minutes ago to let me know that everything is working great. When I went to the house I really thought I was going to be looking for interference, or something totally crazy, since all of her devices we loosing their charge. Very weird.

Just a heads up for my fellow AV Networking Specialists.

Mike

I can see that. I get horrible battery life if I am in an area with very poor or intermittent cell coverage. Or if I am in an area of zero coverage, the radio keeps looking and looking for a signal and drains the battery.

Thanks for the info. Do you include battery service in your warranty? :)

We put a Sonos system in a month before this happened, so of course I get blamed.

Good catch. What's interesting to me is that your troubleshooting call was for battery performance and not the fact that their web browsing was painfully slow and I'd imagine the Sonos (and other devices) streaming content was completely useless.

One of the most annoying aspects of a site visit is the risk of being potentially blamed for things that are completely unrelated after you leave.

Thanks for the heads up. The home network is about the only thing all those devices have in common so good catch on finding the bad modem.

Unknown network, first thing I do, speedtest.net and a screen capture. Last thing on the way out, repeat, better yet have the client do it too as a sign off.

Smell the milk...before you pour the glass.
(Otherwise you have to wash the glass.)

Yeah, I also prefer to have them turn on the system on their own before I'll troubleshoot anything.

You have to wash the glass anyway!