iphone 4 wifi connection drops after few minutes

I got an iphone 2 days ago and there was a slew of unfortunate events and challenges ever since.



The first day, I was showing off my new gadget to my friends and accidentally dropped the phone on concrete floor - probably from about 3 ft high. The glass shattered to peices corner-to-corner, edge-to-edge. All my friends had their jaws dropped and in about 2 minutes couple of support guys quickly took it inside and showed to everyone and for the rest of that day I was receiving condolences from everyone.



I took it to the apple store same day and they were nice enough to replace it right away with another brand new peice. I brought home that new peice and then the wifi issues ensued. The phone successfully connects to my wifi using WPA PSK secured 802.11b\11g standard connection configuration. In about 2-3 mins the connection goes inactive. Any internet based app just sits there and does nothing with an eventual timeout message.



I tried variety of solutions including resetting iphone network (Settings -> General -> Reset -> Reset Network Settings), forget and re-identify network and lastly I took it to the apple store. The "genius bar" - terrible misnomer, they often dont know what they are talking about. They hooked me up with another new phone and said that if they problem repeats then they are not sure what the issue is. They said the issue might be with iOS 4 and that it is rough around the edges (whatever that means). They simply asked me to live with the problem and wait for 4.1 OS update.



I came back and poked around my router settings. Tried the wireless mode (802.11 g) and changed encryption to AES from PSK and nothing seemed to have made any difference.



Finally, I changed the channel from the default 1 to 4. Voila, I am now browsing internet at blazing speeds and the connection stayed on for nearly a day now without dropping once. I used the network speed test app and registered speeds upwards of 8.3 mbps download and 2.5 mbps upload speeds. Life is happy now... I love the new phone and the display is gorgeous!!

I am not convinced I understood the issue though. Because there are several other devices in the house that were able to successfully use my previous wireless router settings and work just fine (including a 3gs iphone of my wife, vonage phone and 2 laptops). So why this change worked is still to be understood.