iOS and the Hassle of Dropping Your Wi-Fi As You Move Away From Your House
This happens to me all the time. I’m in an app that’s attached to my home WiFi and I walk (or drive, as a passenger) away from my house. As I move further from my house, the signal gets progressively weaker and whatever app I’m in just hangs, stuck waiting for a reply from my home WiFi that’s never coming.
[…]
Some time ago, Apple added the setting Cellular > Wi-Fi Assist (scroll down below that long list under CELLULAR DATA) that someone suggested might help with this, though I believe the intent was to help with poor WiFi, not specific to this problem. As it turns out, this is on for me. Does not make a difference.
3 Comments RSS · Twitter
I'm pretty sure this is the exact problem that Wi-Fi Assist was made for. But it doesn't help me, either.
This is sometimes the case because the connection is asymmetric. The access point’s antenna can send with quite a bit more strength than a comparably tiny iPhone. So your receive stength might be fine, but the access point can’t see what the iPhone sends back.
If you have control over your access point, you can try turning down the 2.4 GHz antenna transmit power and see.if it helps.
Whether it’s possible for iOS to detect this situation and behave more intelligently I don’t know. However the above changes helped a family member quite a bit.
#Lanny
Yes! Thought WiFi Assist's entire reason for existing was to deal with this exact problem.
Android has a similar feature but I don't use it since my data plan is not truly unlimited. Don't want to think I'm on WiFi and instead I have been using mobile data this whole time!!!! However, I appreciate the presence of this feature for just the reason quoted in the article.
