Fivespot not sending WiFi signal

My Fivespot only works when it is plugged in to my computer. Once I unplug it, the "Wifi" indicator turns on however I cannot see the SSID in my Network names. I have tried 3 different computers and my phone. This is my second device the first one did the same. Has this happen to anybody? And if so how did you resolve the issue? Customer service was not able to resolve the issue. Thank you in advance!

Accepted answers

apriljellybean

I had the same issue and was on my 3rd computer because they thought it was the computer. It would connect fine when tethered but not wirelessly. It would recognize the fivespot and I would type in password and it would say security key mismatch. I finally got someone at Verizon to stick with me and not just pass me along (I was sent back and forth between Verizon, Best Buy, and Toshiba for 3 days). Everyone knew there was a problem but no one knew how to fix it. This fix worked for me, hopefully it will work for you.

Go to Start Menu

Click on Control Panel

Click on Hardware and Sounds

click on Device Manager

Click the arrow next to Network Adaptors

Right click on the wireless lan (mine was Realtek)

Click update driver software.

That should be it. I hope that is your same problem.

All comments

KINGWESTLY

I am having the exact same problem. I have done the hard restart (press power 10 times within 15 seconds while the device is turned on), reinstalled Verizon Wireless Manager, and tried it on several computers as well as my phone. Very frustrating. I plan to call Verizon tomorrow and get this handled.

Pls post with any info you receive.

Jason

chamberlin

Same thing here, just got a replacement AC30 five spot device tonight (Best Buy), worked fine at the store and at home right afterwards, then later in the evening I tried it again, and now back to no WIFI connectivity: 4 green lights, but no computer, iPhone, laptop, netbook could find the WIFI SSID for the five spot... (in all, 6 different WIFI devices were tried)...... ugghhh. And just to clarify, I also did all the reset tricks too (on the first unit I had) but I am not touching a single thing with this new one, so that I can be sure that nothing I did caused the unit to stop broadcasting the WIFI signal... What the heck is going on with these units!

chamberlin

Today, did a hard reset (10 postive clicks within 15 sec. with 5-spot turned on) and after reboot, the thing works again... but the sporadic WiFi connectivity is very annoying. Will continue to report back here as time goes on...

Osvaldo

Mine still does not work, i did the reset and still doesnt work. is this device working for anybody?

chamberlin

OK, last night and today I am back to no wifi again...works fine on tethered, but NO wifi device will find the five spot....reset a dozen times, took the battery out many times etc... nothing... It would be nice to know that Verizon is working on at least answering our questions, if not a firmware update...

MY5ISJUNK

My 5 is the biggest piece of JUNK I have used. After 4 plus hrs on with tech support, 2 hr of my office tech people working the problem and 4 different computers, a second go round for 40 min with me on with Verizon tech support that ended with them telling me to take it back to the store. 2 hr with Best Buy representatives on the phone with Verizon Tech support to get the NEW MY 5 to work, no resolution to the same problem as the previous MY 5 JUNK that everyone else is having. On top of that while I was sitting in Best Buy waiting on a fix three other people brought in the My 5 with the same issues. Talked with the Best Buy manager about sending this **bleep** poor excuse of a product back to Verizon due to the amount of time his employees were wasting on trying to resolve the same customer issue and he agreed. I hope the rest of the Best Buy cooperation does the same and pulls My 5 from there shelves. At this point I was just **bleep** at the MY5, so I tried to get the WI FI devise as a substitute and be able to continue with the service, Best Buy that I was at did not have the device but there was one at the store across town. Off I go, get there and they want to charge me an additional $55 dollars for their "old model". I for one am looking at other cell phone companies, I have had it with Verizon and their **bleep** poor Customer Service.

chamberlin

Dude, just get the MiFi 2200 (older model) and you will be happy - the MiFi 2200 is SO much faster and easier to use, and of course,

it actually works, unlike the POS 5 Spot. They should call it the Five-Spotty At Best.

I would not pay extra $55 for it though! My Best Buy was more than happy to get one from another store and even transferred my black tie warranty plan to it, without me even asking. Best Buy was very helpful in my case.

jim_2009

I have had the fivespot delivered after receiving a promo call from sales person. However, I have been reluctant to begin installation.......moreso now that i've read all the complaints/problems. My 1-yr old mifi 2200 is working "ok", not great , presently at 168 kbps download and 11 kbps as I write this; BUT that varies greatly..... usually 5 to 10 times better than dial-up. I'm using a 2004 Dell desktop w/belkin wireless adaptor and a 2008 lenovo notebook.

The promotion to me was that my monthly bill would decrease from $60 t0 $50 with a 2 year contract and penalty for "over usage would be $10 per gb vs $0.05 per mg($50/gb)......if I'd sign up immediately, like within 3 days.

I'm really considering just returning the fivespot and forgetting the whole thing. Getting too old for the hassle I guess.

Not asking for advice; just saying...............!?

chamberlin

Jim, the deal I got through best buy was $35/month for 3 GB/month with the same overage penalty as you were quoted, 2 year contract with I think a $175 ETF. If it wasn't for BB giving me a MifFi 2200, Verizon would have lost me as a subscriber from the beginning. Yes download speeds can vary, my friend's iphone 4 is 2-3 times faster datawise on ATT 3G but the MiFi is a much more usable device in my lifestyle, and the download variances don't bother me at all.

(and I don't think the data speeds are any faster on the Five Spot anyways, it's a limit of the Verizon network...)

jim_2009

Chamberlin, thanks. I'm still in wait-and-see/watch/decide mode for a few days. I really hate the hassle of new systems/start-up installation. I had intended to wait for my present contract to expire in 2011 and at that time to try the other service providers as I did a year ago. Verizon was better than Sprint and ATT in my location then and I presumed they would continue to be when I convinced myself a week ago to say ok to 5spot.

I can't complain about customer service for he most part: reps have been very cordial but not necessarily "expert" in their advice. Mostly, I appreciate speaking with people I can understand......partly a hearing problem for me, but also language without heavy foreign accent ,ie not midwestern english.

LeoTheLion

I was able to setup the five spot and have been using it for a couple of days now as a modem and a hotspot. My cirrnt speed is apx 300kbps in Southeast part of Miami (Kendall) but I get up to 1Gbps at home in Miami Lakes. I have noticed that device does get very hot and that I had to toggle it on/off to get a connection today (day 3). I'll report back if Amy of this changes. BtW...to get the device setup to run on and activated via Vista, I had to jump through some hoops and register ells as the admin to install the vzaccess software.

orcadreamer26

We had the same issue with our fivespot......After hours on our own trying to get it to connect, we went back to the store where we purchased it from. Our situation was because of our windows Vista. They explained it to us as Vista only identifies passwords that are 5 or 13 characters long. As you know, the password for the fivespot is way longer than 13 characters. The rep at the store was able to access the fivespot on a different system and went to 192.168.0.1 (in address bar) and changing the password for the fivespot to a 5 or 13 character password and it worked like a charm.

jwt

I just bought the five spot. It was activated in the store yesterday. After the store my family and I went out to a restaurant where I fired up the five spot and was surprised that my kids were able to connect their Itouch 4g's to the five spot no problem and get a very solid and reliable signal (typing in the 18 character password a pain but more on that later). I tested it myself with a live streaming video feed which played beautifully without any stoppage. On the way home i left the five spot on and connected an itouch to a live streaming video feed again and over the course of the 7 mile drive the video maybe paused twice for no more than 2 seconds. Once home, I went ahead and tethered the five spot to my computer, installed vz access manager as instructed. Once the VZ access manager recognized the device I was immediately given a dialogue box telling me there was a firmware update for the five spot and did I wish to update. I said yes and it took maybe 10 minutes for the firmware update to run through. I charged the five spot overnight and this morning I have tested it around the house connecting various wireless devices to it...so far it is working as advertised and I have had no problem connecting any device. I do wonder, given all the problems well articulated in this thread, if the firmware update I was led through is a response to some of the problems? I also wonder how to change the password of the device as who wants to type in an 18 character password....I went into the internet set up through the http:// address and there seemed to be a place to change the password but when I typed in the present password (required) it kept telling me that was different than the one stored so I gave up.

VZW_Zrock02

Here are the set up instructions for the Password Change:

Password

Select Basic Setup →Password to access:

Click Apply to confirm your configurations, or click Cancel to cancel

your configurations.

The current password will be "admin"

vegaskev

I have tried all of these solutions on all four pages of this forum thread. I'm extremely disappointed that "zack", a verizon rep, was bold enough to log on and advise everyone how to change their passwords, yet wouldn't address the main issue at hand: GETTING THE FIVESPOT TO ACTUALLY WORK UNTETHERED.

We need a solid solution to this issue. My drivers are updated, my laptop in less than 2 years old, i followed all the instructions, spoke with tech for over an hour. Rebooted, reset, restarted, reconfigured, pulled my sim, set to CDMA, prayed to jesus, prayed to gandhi, prayed to allah, prayed to Zeus, prayed to Thor, prayed to Verizon......nothing works. My Fivespot ONLY workds when directly connected to the laptop. I feel like I have wasted way to much time and now it's costing me money.

DavidRo

I was suffering the same fate as other folks posting here but came across a solution that worked for me, at least so far today. I was testing a USB cable for use with a BlackBerry and found by trial and error that it was actually a charge only USB cable. (It came with a Duracell battery charger, so that would make sense!). So in the process of testing it I realized that the cable did not allow me to use the FiveSpot 'tethered' with the VZAcess software as most other charge/sync USB cables do. So it does charge the FiveSpot, but since the device doesn't recognize it as a data cable, you can turn the FiveSpot on with it connected to a laptop USB port which only charges it. What surprised me was that suddenly the hotspot feature starting working again - perhaps due to the fact that it wasn't connected via a charge/sync cable, but only connected via a charge cable only?? A long shot, but now the FiveSpot works perfectly, whether charging while connected to USB or by itself. You can buy these charge-only cables from a few places, including Amazon - here's a link http://amzn.com/B000FFV1VW. Good luck to anyone else and I hope this helps.

jjacobs

Interesting theory, but I would like to toss my experience up here as it seems slightly different but mostly the same as the does not see wireless network portion of posts. I do use a fivespot myself, but I am a computer technician with a specialization in networking CCNA certified. I have a customer trying to use their fivespot in wifi mode, it has been disastrous, sometimes it works, sometimes it dosen't. When it dosen't, the Wireless network drops from the availible networks (completely disapears) this happens on 3 seperate machines and a kindle fire. Have tried resetting it, taking battery out, etc. This sometimes makes it work for a day, sometimes it does nothing to resolve the issue, either way, within 1-2 days if it did work, the problem reemerges. The strangest part (and this is the difference to the above posts) is that when it is reset it will show the wireless network, allow connections to it, and then after a period of about 15-45 seconds the network disapears again. This has become an issue of extreme frustration to me as these customers bought 3 machines from me for the express purpose of playing diablo 3, they dropped 2 grand on the machines, have replaced their fivespot with a new one (under warranty where it still cost them 20something dollars) I really don't have anything to add as far as a resoloution goes because I've tried it all, and it simply does not work. These customers live well out of range of any other broadband companies and as diablo 3 is connection constantly required game, they feel (and rightly so) that they've wasted 2 grand on machines when their old machines worked perfectly for what they were using them for previously (and as diablo3 can't be played) would work for them completely fine now. Verizon phone support has been completely unhelpful, telling me to do things I've already done and when I finally get to the point of all fixes having been tried, simply telling me it must be their computers. I know this is not the case as I have tested this at my office (att dsl broadband, wireless signal) and everything works perfectly. I am simply at a loss, and as an earlier poster said, have even tried praying in my desperation. So there, verizon sells them this fivespot with a contract, and it is completely useless for what they want to do. (I even tried tethered mode and then used internet connection sharing to spread the signal out through ethernet, but this added far too much latency and was a complete failure) All and all I'm almost to the point of having to buy back the machines (a huge loss for me as they have already devalued in the time this has occurred) I am simply at a loss.

John_Getzke

JJ,

Have you had a chance to walk your users through a site survey yet? The disconnections (assumed to be on VZW's side) may be related to interferance in the area or the local towers of your customers. A simple site survey may reveal some dead zones in thier enviornment that can be corrected by purchasing amplifiers or antennas.

Site Survey:

http://3gstore.com/page/13_will_an_antenna_help_me.html