I wasnt sure if this was a network or apple issue so I'll try here first.

I have a friend in a rural area who just uses an ipad on a 3G sim. There is no phone line or broadband into the building and he would like to be able to print from his ipad to a wifi printer he has bought.

I'm just playing with an old thomson router I had lying about. I've reset it, setup a basic wifi and I can connect and configure it with my laptop and my GNex connects to it ok as does the printer.

But his ipad wont retain the connection longer than a couple of seconds. What appears to be happening is that it connects but then disconnects after it tries to access the internet.

Is this standard behaviour for ipads or am I missing something obvious ?

I have managed to print a test page from the ipad, but it lost the connection when I sent it, but resumed when I reconnected it.