Friday, February 20, 2015

FireTV Stick won't connect to Cisco IOS-based wifi access points

The fix:
dot11 wpa handshake timeout 500
Enter the above command in configuration mode on the Cisco IOS-based access point.

The problem: the FireTV Stick had an update in early December 2014 (it seems, maybe it was earlier) to version 54.1.0.2_user_102018720 and units with this update will fail to authenticate when trying to connect to at least some Cisco access points. My FireTV Stick was shipped this week and it had this problem out-of-the-box. After reading the first 2 pages of the thread linked at the bottom of this post, it seems that this update made the FireTV Stick slower at finishing the WPA handshake, and this is causing it to fail on the Cisco APs that have a lower WPA handshake timeout. I'm guessing that Cisco IOS-based access points have a lower WPA timeout by default than maybe some consumer wifi gear.

Thanks to Joseph P. Mundschau on this Amazon forum thread for the solution!