I keep seeing this mentioned as a fix... But here is my experience, in 12 screenshots. I kept the time on the screen so people can follow me from my garage to my office under my Eero 7 Max mesh. But, keep it mind that the exact same issue happened under my Orbi 960 mesh while no other device I have, including pre-iPhone 15 iPhones, suffer of this issue under either mesh setup.
1) To settle for once and all, I have no VPN:
2) I am standing in my garage, under my Eero satellite named "Garage", with my iPhone 15 Pro Max's Wifi turned on. It correctly detects my mesh network name, it correctly claims full signal strength, it claims it has connected to it, yet the Wifi icon at the top is curiously missing:
3) I click on the blue circled-"i" to see the network details my phone sees. Clearly it has settled on a non-Eero local IP address, and there is no router IP. This feels more like a cellular connection while the phone thinks it is Wifi:
4) If I look at my Eero app, all the latest version of course, I see that the phone is connected to the correct mesh satellite with the correct 6G connecting type! So, the phone is connected to wifi, but gets its bearings from cellular...
5) Let's run a SpeedTest to see what this weird combo delivers. Keep in mind that if I forget to turn off my phone's wifi and walk around the house, this is the bandwidth I am suffering through. And notice how SpeedTest does figure out that the network is through AT&T, not Xfinity that my Eero router is connected to:
6) Let us walk back to my office where the main Eero gateway/router is and keep the phone's Wifi on. It correctly detects the network name, shows full signal, claims to have connected to it, and now the Wifi icon in the upper right corner is correctly displayed:
7) Diving into that connection via the circled-"i", now we see what a proper Wifi connection looks like, with the proper device IP assigned and the Eero router's address correctly populated:
8) And the Eero router sees my phone as connected to my Office router directly without going through a mesh satellite, at 6Ghz:
9) Given my 1200/40 service from Xfinity, and the 6G network iPhone 15 Pro Max can use, the speeds are awesome. Again, note how SpeedTest now correctly identifies Xfinity as the source of the connectivity:
10) In case anyone was curious what the real cellular-only experience is like, let us turn Wifi off:
11) As confirmed by the Eero app, my phone is no longer on my mesh network:
12) And SpeedTest shows this via AT&T:
Needless to say, a much MUCH better experience than in step 5's weird combo where the phone thinks it is on Wifi but actually is using cellular data. Whatever code path there is in iOS 17.x, that particular situation is making it hit the brakes like it is nobody's business...
I hope this, plus my previous post a page or two back, helps someone at Apple to sort this issue out in iOS 17.2.
Tuna