Iphone Connecting to WIFI as two devices with two MAC addresses

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Level 1

11 points

Iphone Connecting to WIFI as two devices with two MAC addresses

We have multiple Iphone 7 devices in our house.

Linksys Velop system. All software/firmware is current.

IOS is current on the iPhone.

When listing the devices, the phone appears twice, each occurrence shows connected to a different node. Each occurrence shows a different MAC address for the device. Only one of the MAC addresses is correct. The other is not even close to the MAC address displayed in settings.

This device is running slower on the WIFI than any of our other devices.

Resetting network settings on phone does not work.

Resetting router does not work.

Forgetting network and reconnecting does not work.

Any clues?

Thanks in advance.

iPhone 7, iOS 12

Posted on Jul 4, 2019 8:09 AM

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Answer 1

Tesserax

Level 10

148,417 points

Jul 4, 2019 8:24 AM in response to Baanman

Does this only happen with all of your household's iPhone 7 devices? ... and no other wireless devices connected to your Linksys Velop mesh network? If you connect any of these same iPhones to another wireless network, does this issue continue ... or only with your Linksys system?

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Answer 2

Baanman Author

Level 1

11 points

Jul 4, 2019 12:09 PM in response to Tesserax

We have three iphone 7's. This only happens with one. We have 15 devices connected to the wireless, and this is the only device that shows multiple MAC addresses. I have no other wireless networks set up in the household, so I would not be able to test this.

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Answer 3

Jul 4, 2019 1:29 PM in response to Baanman

When an iOS device is scanned by a network it returns a bogus MAC address to prevent the Wi-Fi router from tracking the phone. If you choose to connect to the network the correct Mac address is returned. So most likely another router in the network scanned the device, but you are not connected to it.

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