FaceTime iOS 6 Poor Connection message

I think it is the iOS 6 update. I have an iPhone 4S and iPad 2. FaceTime worked perfectly on both without any problems until I updated. The same for my mother's iPad. As soon as she updated, she got the poor connection/reconnecting/black screen messages as well. My husband has the old 4 iPhone and never updated to iOS 6. He has no problems using FaceTime with others who also haven't updated. He can FaceTime with his phone to his sister's iPad (she also didn't update) with no issues. I can sit next to him in the same room trying to FaceTime with my mother and it is constantly stopping and the quality is horrible. It is frustrating beyond belief because we use it so she can see her grandson. I am furious I have these devices we paid a lot of money for that are useless now. I would respect Apple a lot more if they acknowledged they are aware of the issues and working to correct them, but their silence makes me wonder if they're even going to bother to do anything at all.

It's most definitely an iOS 5 bug. Very surprising AND disappointing Apple hasn't fixed or even acknowledged the issue, especially since the 6.0.1 update supposedly "fixes a bug that could impact wifi".

Er, iOS 6 bug. Curse you Apple, you won't even let me edit my own posts?!?

Yup, my guess is they have rolled out a new server (or set of servers) to handle IOS 6 clients with wifi and 3g support , these are the machines that are having the issues.

Whether they are being overloaded, running out of streams resoursces, whatever, can Apple even consider offering an upgrade where we can "turn facetime 3g support off", in other words go through the old servers again? It would be pretty simple for them to code that, just point to a different server.

Just a thought ...

This is unbelievable! Four months' worth of posts talking about this problem and the fix still isn't in. Very disappointing!

Thank God I am not the only one. My husband and I have been facetiming for over a year. He has a Macbook and I had an Iphone 4 until November when I upgraded to an iPhone 5. I updated to iOS 6.0.2 when it came out. Now I feel like I downgraded because when we do facetime now, it always disconnects! I am bummed out that there has been no solution to this problem yet.

Hmm. if you still have the iphone 4 it might still be good for facetimeing!!

I wish I had some devices here that were never upgraded to IOS 6 or higher, seems to be the servers that handle the old non 3g facetime are still working great ... of course this is just my speculation that it is a different group of servers that handle the 3g/wifi facetime stuff .. Apple hasn't said anything on it as far as I can tell anyway!

Might be worth a try though .. you can even use your new iphone as a wifi hotspot for the iphone 4 to get wifi access from!

hth

I understand your frustration. Having 'upgraded' my Mothers iPad2 to IOS6 some months ago, and my iPad3 to IOS6 at the same time, Facetime became unusable. For many months before this, Facetime worked flawlessly.

I spent many hours trying to fix this, but as I am in Canada and my mother is in the UK, elderly and not good with computers, this was really tough.

In the end we got it working, and the solution for was to have her service provider replace her wireless router with a newer model. This rather desperate measure was taken after I had read (In beleive in this thread) of some users having success after replacing their older routers with more recent models.

Even after we got everything working, we recorded upload speeds half that which could be obtained using a Windows 7 laptop, so I still suspect that wifi on these iPads are still not as good as they could be. Maybe Apple will work on improving this for their next IOS release. If you search this thread you will find my earlier postings where I provide the wifi test results (mothers iPad 2, brother-in-law's iPad3 and his Windows 7 laptop)

Although I don't seem to have a problem with Facetime on my end, I decided to read up on my router (a Netgear R6300) and was surprised to find that on the support page for my router, the first article listed under 'General Information' was titled 'wifi issues with IOS6'..

http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/21865

As I mentioned, my router is working fine with Facetime but it is interesting that Netgear have acknowledged there are issues. It is not only Netgear equipment which is having issues with IOS6 devices however. My mother’s router was a Thompson device. I read somewhere that someone believed that Apple was not following the wireless standard 100%. Perhaps they are using a mode which was only in draft when it came out, and is now supported in newer routers, but not the older ones. I don’t know if this is the case, but often wifi routers are released when the standards are in draft (my R6300 and my Dlink DIR-825 before that are cases in point). There is always a risk then that when the standard gets ratified, some draft feature is dropped or modified in some way.

I agree with others in this discussion, that there are multiple issues contributing the poor/unusable Facetime experience. Poor wifi is likely only one of them.

I am not suggesting you go out and spend hard cash to replace your router, but if you happen to have been planning on upgrading anyway, it might be worth bringing those plans forward. If your service provider supplied your router, then maybe like my mother, you can get them to upgrade it,

Good luck

I'm having the same problem with my new Iphone 5 on ios6. I have been using facetime for years without problems. Shame on you apple. Please fix this!!!

It seems to me that it's another symptom of the wifi issues with iOS 6. To cut a long story short, it only seems to affect certain devices with certain routers. Everything worked perfectly for me at home until the day I upgraded to IOS 6. My router is a Nethear DGN1000 with the latest firmware. Neither of the updates have solved it, nor have the many troubleshooting solutions. The problems were somewhat helped by changing the router security from WPA2-PSK to WPA-PSK (I can now access the app store, for example) but they still remain in terms of speed of connection etc. However on my g/f's Cisco router it works perfectly.

Whatever was changed between iOS 5 and iOS 6 and the way the device interacts with the router is the issue. Given that so many people have had the same experience as me, namely that they had no issues until they upgraded, the obvious answer is iOS 6. Unfortunately neither Apple nor Netgear seem to have any idea how to solve it. I can't even summon the will to be optimistic for iOS 6.1.🙂

I am having the same problem with Facetime. My parents are using IPad and they live overseas. I live in the U.S. and I am using IPhone 4s. We tried everything to get the problem fixed. Even we got the DSL company overseas to increase the data throughput. Still the same issue. The final conclusion, is the wireless router/modem. For the next couple of weeks my parents and I, are not going to be able to use facetime until I send them a wireless router/modem from the U.S.

Since technology is moving so fast (advances every year), so, by defualt that makes us owning "old equipment". In the eye of the beholder.

Apple is to be blamed for this. The programmers should have imbeded a code that will recognize any firmware. For example, you can open an excel spreadsheet in Microfsoft Office 2013 that was saved in Microsoft Office 97. I think Linksys, Netgear, TD Link, etc..., should thank Apple, for making us upgrade to new routers.

I hope I am wrong. I will provide you an update by the end of February.

It's got nothing to do with the router, it's iOS 6, so don't waste your time or money. Most of us are using AirPort routers and have the problem.

I noticed that IOS6.1 is available for installing on my iPad 3. However there doesn't appear to be anything related to Facetime or wifi fixes mentioned in the release notes. Has anyone read of any fixes beyond what is mentioned in these release notes?.

I don't remember where but i did read that they had made some changes on the WiFi. I updated and honestly at the beginning i noticed wifi staying stuck when opening a site for a few seconds longer than usual before fully loading. I reset my network settings on the device and it started loading pages fast again. My girl normally uses facetime alot with her family overseas and she tells me that it seems to be a little better but she still sees the reconnecting message a few times but not as often as before.

The issue still exists in 6.1, all three of my iOS 6.1 devices STILL have the issue. My old iOS 5 devices work fine.