wifi doesn't work with IOS 7

My iphone 5 IOS7 had similar weirdness. It would connect to Home wifi router only when I did a fresh power on/off of the router. Once out of range and then come back it would not work. I spent hours on phone with applecare installing phone as a new device and then updating and had same problem. Then when I went into Apple store and AT&T store the wifi worked no problem. My ipad and 4S phones on IOS7 worked fine on our home wifi.

I finally called my service provider, AT&T, since it is their dsl modem and wifi router. A nice women had me do one thing on my AT&T dsl gateway and it worked!!!! Crazy!!

I went on a direct connect computer to the gateway and connected directly to the gateway address: 192.168.1.254. I had to enter the gateway password (not same as wifi). Then under the WIRELESS (WIFI) section I changed the name of my wifi network name to something completely different and I used the same password still. I then reboot my iphone 5 and it found the new network and I had to enter the password like a new wifi network connection and VOILA! It has worked ever since!

CRAZY!

ldoray wrote:

Really people, I thought this was a discussion for "support". I have been following this thread to see if anyone comes up with a fix for our mutual issue of IOS 7 causing wifi problems. Criticizing each other doesn't help any of us!

iOS 7 doesn't cause any wi-fi problems. You need to look for another cause.

There have been exactly ZERO confirmed instances that iOS 7 has been the root cause of a wi-fi issue. More likely, it is defective hardware.

If you have not already used troubleshooting articles: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1398 & http://support.apple.com/kb/ts1559 , do so now. If your issue persists, contact Apple.

Phone: 4S

Lost all Wi-Fi connectivity after istalling ios 7.

Wi-Fi not grayed out.

I reset the phone twice, reset wifi network settings multiple times. Apple support told me they would repair it for $199.00. After 10 days traying everything I decided to do what some people were saying. Turned wifi off, turned the phone off and put it in the freezer for 10 minutes, turned the phone back on and then the wifi came back 100%, it has been 5 days an it is still working like new. I know it does not make sense, I tried it because I had tried everything else. I called apple support to let them know, left a message with my case number, they have not call me back.

woodmicha wrote:

I did use the freezer method which solved the wifi greyed out issue. Unfortunately the wifi still doesn't find the networks... I suspect the issues are related.

Pls try a power cycle on the router - unplug power source, wait a some brief time, then plug power back in.

General troubleshooting steps:

1.) Router set to 802.11n only, 20MHz only, WMM enabled, security disabled.

2.) Use PC's wifi to scan your environment. Do you see any wifi routers that have strong signals? Do you see any wifi routers that have similar names as yours?

3.) Does your router have a fancy SSID? Try a simpler name. Instead of "Tony's Router", change it to "TonyRouter". An inocent space can be a source for problem.

4.) Set your iphone's name to something simple and short. Instead of "Yvette's iPhone4S", set it to YvetteIphone4S". Removing the apostrophe actually fixd the wifi grayout problem for some people.

5.) Site closer to the wifi router. Wifi routers can die too. I've had trusty old routers that seem to work fine everyday then start to act up. Some days ok, some days can't keep a connection.

Best wishes.

FIXED!!! And here is exactly how I did it.

I have an iphone 4s and upgraded to iOS7. Worked great for a few weeks until bluetooth and wifi stopped working. I firmly believe it was caused by some bug between the quick menu buttons and the system menu buttons for bluetooth and wifi.

Anyways, I tried everything I read others were doing to fix theirs including the airplane mode>network reset as apple claims to do. I also tried a total reset, including cloud restore and also going to a new phone. By the way, if your wifi doesn't work and you reset your phone and lose your apps, you will not get them back unless you backup to your computer. Icloud works through Wifi and you're in trouble if you haven't backed up to your computer as well. I tried several things and talked to a few tech guys who were nice, but didn't solve anything for me. He basically ended our conversation with the fact that my phone is faulty.

Finally, I was on Ifixit and stumbled across a post about using a hair dryer. There were actually quite a lot of people who all said it worked for them. I was ready to go get a new phone the following day so I just figured I would try it against all reason and see if it worked for me.

Here is EXACTLY what I did.

First, I turned ON wifi and bluetooth via the slideup quick menu from the iphone. I know this doesn't actually turn it on in the setup menu due to the bug, but I enabled it none the less.

Second, I put my phone on the counter and held the hair dryer on the end of the phone, mainly on the headphone jack and along that whole end only. I literally held it an inch away for about 3-5 mins. I noticed the bluetooth icon came on and I couldn't believe it was working! I checked in the menu (while still holding the dryer) and wifi was still greyed out. I then held the dryer basically right on the headphone jack and power button (almost touching) for another 3-5 mins. Finally it said 'iphone is too hot, please cool phone". It also had a slider for "emergency call".

I let the phone cool down and when it rebooted, wifi was back and working fine. That was 3 days ago!

I then erased and reset my phone and then was able to icloud restore over wifi back to where I was before the problem started.

I hope this works for you! I definitely think you need to get to the screen where it overheats, because when it started back up it seemed like it did some sort of total hardware reset in the software. Almost like it reinstalled my wifi and bluetooth sort of thing.

Good luck and I hope this works for you!!

So I just get back from a trip to Boston where I used my 4s with no problem on various WIFI networks. Today, WiFi stops working while I am at home. Totally grayed out slide switch. Take it to my local Apple store. Told to come back at 6:30 when somone will help me. Came back and the young (maybe 17 years old) "Genius" never mentions that this has been a known problem. Doesn't even know how to get my phone out of its case. I had to do it for him. Takes the phone in the back of the store where he says he is going to look inside it. Doubt that ever happened. Came back and said sorry, the unit must have a short and wants to sell me a replacement for $200. These are solid state devices. Shorts don't suddenly appear in solid state construction.

I decide to go to Verizon and see what they will do for me. On my way to Verizon I decide to pull over to the side of the road and google this problem. That's when I found this thread. But I also found a suggestion to turn off the phone, put it in a ziplock freezer bag and leave it in the freezer for 15 minutes. Since my house was between me and the Verison store I decided to give it a try....It worked!!! I took the phone out of the freezer, powered it up and it found the WiFi network on it's own, connected and now all is OK. I will see if this stays OK or if the problem re-occurs and will let you know. So far it seems an easy way to save $200.

I have now constructed a rather 'stickyback plastic' Heath Robinson "cool case" for my iphone 4s in which it is laid on a gel freezer pack and the wifi has been on constantly with no problems for over two hours now (only lasted around 15 minutes once out of the freezer).

Totally ridiculous that I have to do this 😠 but at least at home I can use wifi because there is no 3G and rarely a phone/text signal in rural north Yorkshire (which is why I got the iphone in the first place to Facetime family and friends over wifi).

Blue Peter would be proud of me! 😀

I've had similar issues today out of the blue my iphone 5 stopped connecting to my wifi networks, home and work. Tried the reset of network settings and switching to Airplane mode etc but nothing worked.

However, just went to try a restore but iTunes would not allow until I had turned off "find my iphone" on the actual phone (settings/iCloud).

As soon as I did this my phone joined my home network and has been working for the last hour without any problems?!?!

Maybe a total freaky fluke but mine appears fixed, didn't even get to do restore!

Thought I'd share just in case it helps someone else.

I tried everything too and finally got through senior advisor because i refuse to pay for replacement and this was the response:

I’d like to go ahead and grant a one-time exception to have this phone replaced, for free. You will be getting a replacement device; please note that this replacement will not carry a warranty (because as I mentioned earlier, replacements roll over the pre-existing warranty, and this warranty expired 243 days ago). You would however be getting completely fresh hardware. The important part though would be to not restore your any backups, you will essentially need to start from scratch, otherwise there is a very high risk that it could cause this issue to occur once again, since the issue derives from the software that was loaded onto the phone, which your backups contain.

To be clear, this issue isn’t originally caused by the software, but rather the KPIs that come from the software updates. Essentially, the software update contains KPIs, which basically tell the hardware how to interact with the software. Whenever you update the device, it pushes new KPIs to the hardware. Before this update, the KPIs you're currently using sit idle, which is why the hardware would continue to work. After updating however, the software attempts to push fresh KPIs to the hardware, and is unable to do s when the hardware is not working properly, which would cause this to occur. {

So yes, software updates causes hardware to fail. Clearly an issue for many.

Thank you so much - this provided the answer I needed to resolve this problem for me. I did not have special characters in the name for the wi-fi router but I had capital letters. It seems that, for some reason, the iPhone preference (but no other device has this preference) is for the name to be all lower case letters - that's my guess because once I changed the router name to all lower case letters my iPhone was able to connect. It was after the iOS 7 upgrade that I was having problems and this resolution worked to resolve this particular fluke,

LiOz wrote:

Hi friends, just an FYI. I had to get 3 new iPhones from apple store (no charge to me) and when I got the third one they asked if I would like to update to ios 7, to which I said NO, bc by that time I had figured the issues, and read through some of y'alls posts. When I got first new phone, I had no idea it was ios 7, after 2nd people at apple store swore up and down it wasn't ios 7, I believed them, but third I knew. They claimed it wasn't ios7 and just simply my "bad luck", I unintentionally laughed, but he was serious. *Sigh. Anyway, after some attempted pressuring by the "genius" I left the apple store with the new phone, running ios 6.1.3. That was over a month ago, and I've had NO issues with my wifi. I, of course, have been slightly tempted to try the newest update, just out morbid curiosity but haven't yet. I have to say that I have always enjoyed my iPhones in the past but this whole experience had made me strongly consider getting something new next year with my upgrade. Wishing y'all some luck!

It's not the update. If it WAS the update ALL iPhones would be affected.

It's a hardware defect that is revealed because of excessive heat. The update process generates heat. Any source of excessive heat would have revealed the defect.

Unless you replacement is also defective, the update wont cause problems. But it's your choice. iOS 6 is a great system, so keep using it if you like.

To gvarnell,

Does your two wifi routers have a long name with the same characters for the first part of the name?

Example:

Router1 SSID = "Johnnie_Appleseed's_wifi_2.4GHz"

Router2 SSID= "Johnnie_Appleseed's_wifi_5GHz"

if iOS7 for some reason only recognize the first part of the name, then the ipad would not be able to join either network reliably.

Remove the apostrophe from the router's SSID and the iPhone's name, if there is one. Shorten the SSID name.

Do not turn enable 40MHz channel for 2.4GHz router.

Turn off one router first.

Do enable WMM.

Security for 802.11n is now required to be WPA2-PSK AES (not TKIP anymore)

Is the iPad5's IP address fixed on the router? If yes, remove it, try joining again.

Or, try setting fixed IP address for the ipad 5 on the router, and set same IP on the ipad5.

Power cycle the router to flush out the dhcp table.

You said ipad 5? Are you refering to the newly released iPad Air?

Upgrade to ios7? It should come with ios7.

I find this part a possible cause of wifi logon trouble:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Host_Configuration_Protocol

"A DHCP client can also request its last-known IP address (in the example below, 192.168.1.100). If the client remains connected to a network for which this IP is valid, the server may grant the request. Otherwise, it depends whether the server is set up as authoritative or not. An authoritative server will deny the request, making the client ask for a new IP address immediately. A non-authoritative server simply ignores the request, leading to an implementation-dependent timeout for the client to give up on the request and ask for a new IP address."

If the ipad retained its last IP address over the upgrade to ios7, it'll request it's last known IP address. Now if the router uses the non-authoritative server method of ignoring the request, but let's suppose Apple's implementation has a very long timeout, the we could see an idevice not being able to join the wifi network.

Best regards.

I believe the software update caused the harware to fail and no update will ever fix the problem. It's already broke!

On Apple support chat I was told "It’s something in any update that could trigger it. It’s an underlying issue that is unfortunately brought to the front by an update. :(" Yes I even got the frown face!

They also said "Ok so the reason why the Wi-Fi grey-out appeared after you updated your device to iOS 7 is because when updating your device will do system checks, if these system checked find a problem with any feature it will be greyed out. This is most popular with the Wi-Fi. Now while under warranty we would gladly replace it, but since you are 322 days out of warranty, there isn’t anything that can be done. If the Apple store has denied replacing your device without an out of warranty fee, the only thing you could do to try to get anywhere would be phone support at 1-800-275-2273. But normally have agreement with the store. What I recommend to prevent such occurrences in the future is to make sure you purchase AppleCare or AppleCare+ this would have kept your device in warranty and we could have replaced your device due to an issue with WIFI."

So now they also want to sell me an AppleCare plan as well as a new phone.

Why does it happen to some and not others? Parts made at different factories and different times would be my guess. My iPhone 4s is just fine. Wy wife's is the problem phone. Also bought about a month earlier.

Apple support chat also said "There is no way for us to tell if your Wi-Fi would have continued to work without updating to iOS 7, it could have gone out at any time.

The reason for this is because it is a hardware problem, and not related to software.

If it was a software problem, a restore as new would have taken care of it."

Not if the install causes the wifi chip to overheat and fry...never to work again even with a restore or anything...it's already shot.

Their reply was "iOS is a software, and would not run too hot, it is the hardware that would run too hot."

Uh yeah , the hardware runs too hot because of the software!

Apple is also pretty much saying your wifi was defective to begin with and our new ios made it not function anymore...sorry...please buy one of our new phones!

For those on this thread with the problem of the greyed out wifi, I have the solution and it's insane. But it works.

This video gives the instructions:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mVkiU2jNSE&feature=youtu.be

Basically, you overheat the phone with a hair dryer until it says it's too hot. It might take 5 minutes. Then put it in the fridge for 10. And wifi is back.

I just did it tonight. It worked. From comments on the video, it looks like it's a permanent fix.

I don't believe that iOS7 killed the wifi chip, I believe there is a deep bug on the software/hardware interface level that even exists on the diagnostic level. This overheating tricks that bug and allows the OS to see the chip as "healthy."

That's my only (layman) explanation. If the problem was truly hardware based, this solution could not work.

Just try it and if it works, pass it along. The guy who made the video deserves an award.

Mine didn't work and I tried all of the other suggestions. I changed the wifi to static IP and then it started to work. Does not work with DHCP. Work around for now.