User of the Acer Chromebook C720 have been complaining for months of dropping Wi-Fi

Mar 27, 2014 09:34 GMT  ·  By

Since it was widely made available, the Acer Chromebook C720 has received good reviews and customers everywhere seemed to be happy with it. Granted, the machine is no speed demon or performance god, but packs enough to keep the regular consumer happy. But as with all budget-products, the Acer Chromebook C720 does come with some issues of its own.

Before we tell you what’s wrong, we’ll take a moment to refresh your memory regarding the specs of the device.

The Chrome lappy packs comes with a 11.6-inch display with 1366 x 768 pixel resolution and draws life from an Intel Celeron 2955U (from the Haswell family) processor combined with 2GB of RAM and integrated HD Graphics.

Anyway, users on the official Acer community forums complain the Chromebook doesn’t come with the best connectivity feats. Here’s what Tem100 has to say:

“The Chromebook keeps dropping wifi signals. To troubleshoot the problem, I've connected with my laptop side by side with my Chromebook and the laptop has no connection problems with the same network.”

“The Chromebook shows the wifi signal at around 48% when the laptop shows 100%. I disconnected wifi on my laptop in case there was some kind of interference and tried again with the Chromebook, but that didn't help. This Chromebook problem started a couple of days after I started using it and seems to be getting worse.”

Other users back up the story.

“My Acer 720P has just begun dropping its WiFi connection (even when it claims it is still connected). Two other laptops are working great with full signals. The 720 is at 75% and will not stay connected. This problem just began last night.”

“For two weeks, it was fine. This is very frustrating. I am going to have to return it. Too bad, if it worked, it would be perfect,” says Paultandberg.

The good news is Acer is reviewing the topic and company representatives have asked users for further specifications regarding the problems. User Mbonadie who is a wireless engineer has been testing the Acer Chromebook C720 and has found that some supplicant drivers don’t work correctly.

“The 802.1X supplicant drivers do not work correctly, which means that the supplicant driver is failing, not the wireless system. Layer 3 devices (routers) have no idea what is going on in the Layer 2 (access point association, 802.1X, switches, DHCP) processes. The Chromebook will associate to the access point just fine, and then the failure happens during the EAP 4-way handshake authentication process and the wireless system drops the client.”

“As a result, the client never gets an IP address because it can never pass the wireless authentication process to move onto the DHCP process. Other wireless engineers have found that if they use TKIP instead of PEAP that the Chromebook works great.”

Hopefully, Acer will review this information and come up with a way to improve things, because having to deal with constant Wi-Fi issues will certainly prove a turn-off for those considering to jump on the Acer Chromebook bandwagon.