iPhone 4 - painfully slow wi-fi performance

Ok had the same youtube 1080 hd video not playing or playing very slow did all the stuff recomended apart from swapping it at apple but i sorted it now my iphone 4 is as fast as my 3g.
Im with SKY flashed the router with netgear firmware 1.03.23 it was previosly on something like sky 1.03.29 i think changed channel to 13 and left it on g only. But very rarely it does totaly stop downloading but so does the 3g which i never noticed before with the 3g

I was having AWFUL wifi speeds on my iPhone 4 and my iPad. My MacBook pro and iPhone 3GS works great on my wifi. One day I had enough and started troubleshooting what it could be. I went into my router and turned off the auto band and turned on just N band. No difference. I then went in and switched it to G band only. Fixed the problem. I've had two iPhone 4 models that have had this problem so I'm thinking it's just my N band. I hope this helps!

I have the exact same problem. To solve it, I turned off n on the router and went g only. Then my iPhone 4 was the same in performance as my 3GS.

Problem with this solution is I've now reduced the speed on my wireless network for all devices to g. Defeats the purpose of upgrading to an n router.

bro can please help me on how to change the said interface to 802.11g

Same issue for me as well.
I've had my iPhone 4 for a couple of weeks now and coping with its wi-fi tantrums has been a constant nuisance; my modem/router is a Belkin N1 Vision and it always worked nicely with my Vista PC, my MacBook Pro and my 3Gs.
The iPhone 4, however, refuses to stay effectively connected to the wi-fi network for more than a couple of hours and, when it does, it's often operating at slug speed. Otherwise, I either get "unable to connect to the network" popups or a "phantom" connection with apparently full signal but no real traffic whatsoever.
I've tried everything suggested (rebooting the router only works as a temporary fix) but to no avail and, sadly, there's no updated drivers/firmware avaliable for my router model at this moment.

One would hope that the upcoming iOS 4.1 will finally address the issue but do we actually have any clue as to whether the issue itself has been actually acknowledged by Apple?

Thanks

*Problem solved for me!*

Got my iPhone 4 last week and noticed the annoying wifi latency. Download speeds were okay - where I live I get around 6.5Mbps and SpeedTest on the iPhone showed those figures pretty accurately. The other computers in the home were operating fine as well from that perspective.

I did two things that significantly eliminated the issue:

1. Switched off 802.11 QoS on the Belkin N1 Router.
2. Switched to Google's DNS - 8.8.8.8 / 8.8.4.4 (previously OpenDNS)

Toggled between these settings back and forth and I would say *the QoS change did most of the trick* - wifi on the iPhone is super fast and YouTube videos load quickly. In fact I don't think the DNS change would have done anything much at all, although it does seem Google's DNS appears a tad faster, but can't be too sure at all.

Note the router still runs on N mode as there didn't seem a way to turn that off.

Give it a try!

I've been using Google's DNS the whole time so I guess what's left for me to try is switching off the QoS.

Thanks for the tip, I'll keep you posted!

For anyone like myself unlucky enough to own a Belkin N1 Vision there is hope.
As long as you don't need the 300Mbps speeds of N you can turn off N and just use b & g.
I have discovered a hidden menu on the N1 that allows you to do just that. I only use my router for wireless internet access so isn't a problem for me. I don't lose any download speeds as I only have a 20Mbps and I dont't use my network to transfer files from one PC to another. If you're the same then go to...
http://192.168.2.1/wifi.html
You will find a hidden page right and right at the very top is a drop down that will allow you to set your router to "11b+g" only and disable N.
Set that and then a little further down is another option "Rate Selection For 802.11g". Set that to 54Mbps. Now go right to the bottom and press Apply Changes.
The router will reboot and your iPhone 4 wifi slowness should be history.

p.s. I don't recommend you mess with anything else in that menu!

same here.....
i have iphone 3gs also and its much more faster on wifi

I'm too lazy to read through 7 pages of posts to figure this out. I have an old Microsoft MN-700 router that's always worked fine, and works great with my 3GS. But the iphone 4 is dead slow connecting with every task. When it does download it is good, but waiting on the the connection with each task is a buzz kill.

For example, if I do a search in the app store it'll give ma a list of results. Clicking one will take me to the page but it won't open it for a long time, upward of a minute. However, if I click back immediately and click it again, it loads immediately. I have found this with other wifi actions including facebook.

I've only really tested this phone out at home but it's a huge problem, and it's nothing to do with the antenna issue as I'm operating it without holding it, 3' from the router.

I'd been having terrible speeds for download on my iPhone 4, max download about 0.5Mbps, but the uploads were in the 2-4Mbps range. On my desktop I was getting 25Mbps down and about 2-4 Mbps upload. My iPhone 3GS was getting at least 12Mbps down and 2-4Mbps upload.

I switched my route, Linksys WRT300N (V1.1), to only G/B mode, and IMMEDIATELY my download speeds shot up to about 12Mbps. Since I don't use any other WiFi that really needs the Wireless N, it will do for now. One note, I have not upgraded to the newest iPhone 4 OS, it's still the one out of the box, nor have I EVER upgraded the router firmware. I may try these two things out and if they work on Wireless N, I'll post a report.

I have a theory that seems to be good.

It is RF noise that kills iPhone's WiFi performance and here is my reasoning:

I live in crowded area, plenty WiFi hotspots around.

At 7am it is all well and good I get 16mbits transfer out of my iPhone. On the other hand, in the evening at 7pm it is down to 0.7mbps or less. People from my street are wildly surfing and that upsets my iPhone.

However, my N8 still shows numbers of 4~6 mbits even at evening time and can play the apprentice from BBC iplayer smoothly. On iPhone 4, if the playback ever starts, it chokes in seconds.

Any feasible solution, Apple? Or should I adjust my sleeping hours to network traffic?

hi everyone,
let me share how I resolved the issue...

Obvously, I got to this thread because I was experiencing the same wi-fi performance issues with my ip4: ADSL about 14-15Mbps with my home computer through the LAN, about 3,5Mbps over Wi-fi (possibly room for some optimizations there, but I can live with that for the moment) but about 0.1Mbps with the ip4 wi-fi as well as frequent connection drops.

After having read the posts I decided to fiddle a bit with the wi-fi settings of dsl router. My router is a freebox (I'm in France), and while I can't select the protocol (among 802.11 b/g/n- it is predifined to g) there was an option regarding the channel. I simply set the channel to "auto select" rather than the a predefined value, and BOOM, the ip4 wi-fi soared up to around 7,5Mbps.

I guess this is just another case of router config... If I were to make a guess, I'd say that the default channel was crowded, but I've got no evidence to support this.

I hope this helps.

Alex.

Message was edited by: alex856

I kinda had the same problem. The way I solved this problem was by finding a less crowded channel on my router. My speed was painfully slow and I had lots of drop-outs before. Now I changed both my wide and standard channel on my router and works perfectly fine. Even upstairs a have same speeds I have on my wired PC.
I think iPhone 4 is a bit more sensitive to interference and some wi-fi channels are more crowded and experience more interference from other devices or appliances.

(iPhone 4 on Linksys WRT610N Router)

whats the **** apple!!! y u cannot make an update to fix our problem!?!?