Q: iOS 8 Wi-Fi problems

I did more testing on my iPhone 6 with iOS 8.1.3

Here is my observation: (If you are APPLE tech person please please read as this may give hints to actual problem)

From the day 1 I am observing WiFi disconnections. (was on iOS 8.1.2 and now upgraded to iOS 8.1.3)

Wireless connects, I can browse the internet. But when pinging iPhone IP address I notice 3-7% packet drops.

I do not notice packet drops with other phones so it can not be router problem.

Ping drop may be acceptable to some extent but my main problem starts after iPhone is locked.(while WiFi is kept on)

Here is what I do to replicate the issue:

I start continuous ping to my iPhone IP address and lock the iPhone.

iPhone pings for about 90 seconds and then ping response stops coming. (This may be deliberately done to save battery by not responding to ping)

After that if I send a message via whatsapp to iPhone from other phone and it reaches my iPhone (iPhone makes notification sound). This means even if ping stopped WiFi was still working. Surprisingly even ping response also starts coming! Ping again stops, after a while.

Packet monitoring on my gateway also notices occasional DNS request and connection to apple.com or icloud.com. When iPhone sends such requests, that time too, ping starts back! And then stops again after a while.

Now I STOP the ping to iPhone. (which means no incoming packets to iPhone)

After a while (say 4-5 minutes) iPhone WiFi disconnects completely. i.e. this time there is no activity going to apple.com or icloud.com. Sending message to iPhone also does not work.

This means iPhone WiFi was awake as long as PING to it was ON. Once Ping stopped - after some amount of inactivity, WiFi goes off completely.

Then I un-lock the iPhone. I can see "WiFi" logo on status bar indicating that WiFi is ON but when I open Mail application, it stays stuck on "Checking for mail". When I open whatsapp, it stays stuck on "Waiting for network"

If I disable and re-enable WiFi everything works again!

Hope this gives some clues to the real reason.

Thanks

More update which looks like FIXED the issue. (WORKAROUND but not a real solution)

Note down IP address of your iPhone and ping it continuously.

Example:

ping -t 192.168.0.10

On Linux you can ping every 10 seconds instead of 1 second

ping -i10 192.168.0.10

Updated to IOS 8.1.3 and my iPhone 6 still have the same problem with the wifi.

I bought a new AC router, and it's more stable but the phone still hangs connecting to internet (so I have to turn airplane mode and back on to get connection).

I reset the network preferences after update but no luck.

Waiting for the next IOS version.

Good test amishmm. !

It happens the same in my iphone. I receive a whatsapp and when I open the phone no connection.

About two weeks ago I bought a new AC router.  My WiFi disconnects went for every 2-3 hours to every 2-3 days.  Now it has been about a week with no disconnects.  The only thing I did was to power off my router and back on once in this time period.  I cannot figure out what is happening.  Last night Apple Engineering called me to get some additional info.. (So they know about the issue).   They wanted to install software on my iPhone to monitor the disconnects but since it has not returned for several days they decided to call me back in a few days to see if I still had the disconnect issue before doing anything else.

Same problem here - Reboot router and then we work for a few days - When I started on this post we couldn't make a full day without a reboot.

Can anyone tell me if WiFi is supposed to disconnect when phone is idle?

My WiFi seems to work fine as long as phone is ON but no sooner I lock it, within few minutes WiFi goes. (Unless I use PING method I reported earlier)

Is there any setting anywhere to tell it not to switch WiFi off?

I don't think it auto switches off.  I always had the WiFi signal icon even when my system was down which I cannot understand.

Well, it shows me WiFi icon too when I unlock the phone but it remains stuck at "Checking for mail" OR "Waiting for network".

I have to manually disable WiFi and re-enable

Doing Google search - people say that once you lock the phone it goes to sleep mode and turns off WiFi and switches on "data" connection.

And when you unlock phone afterwards - it turns off data and reconnects to WiFi. May be that is why you always see WiFi icon on.

But in my case, I have disabled "data" connection. So what I believe is that iPhone gets confused.

On lockscreen (sleep) it switches off WiFi and waits for data to be turned on. But since in my case, data is forced off, it keeps waiting and then when phone is unlocked - it does not disable data thinking that data is still not connected and then does not go ahead with re-enable WiFi too and hence even if WiFi icon is shown, it still remains inactive

PS: Just a guess

My iPhone 6 just went to essentially zero usability at work.  I can no longer connect to the wifi at work at all.  My iPhone 5 and the iPad next to it still connect, although they lose the wifi connection every time they go inactive, and I have to reconnect either by turning wifi off then back on, or turning on airplane mode then turning it back off

but nothing I do with restore the wifi connect on my iPhone for the last 2 days, including resetting the router.

But I am deep in a building where I don't get cellular signal, so now I have a useless phone when I'm at work.  Augh.

I am so incredibly discouraged with Apple regarding both the crappy wifi connection adnt eh calendar GST time problem that are still not fixed, even though being known for quite some time..  All the wifi connection problems began immediately when I upgraded to iOS8

PLEASE GOD, APPLE, FIX THIS NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!

also, If I try to force the wifi to connect, iPhone tells me the wifi password is incorrect, even though is definitively isn't

absolute crap

I Just upgraded to 8.1.3 hoping the undefined 'bug fixes' would improve my wifi.  No such luck.

under IOS7 this iPad was the best wifi device I had.  It would work all over my house and garden, and display 30+ SSIDs.  Now it can only see mine, and only eorks in rooms adjacent to the router. 

Personally the only problem I have with wifi in 802.11g mode is switching AirPlay devices sometimes causes the music player to abort and lose its place in a playlist, so I guess I'm lucky there.. The AirPlay thing only started happening when I upgraded to version 8.  I also noticed when I got the iPhone 5 if I use the 5ghz (802.11 n mode I think) band the range was like 10 feet or so and not very useful. This could be a hardware issue but I don't need speed from my phone.

i have a bug report ticket on bugreport.apple.com about 3 months old and apple "engineering" got back this week asking me to install a network event capturing tool. When my issue did happen with minimal persuasion I noticed this in the generated logs:

AppleBCMWLANCore::reportProblem(): Problem 'BCMWLAN Core User Induced' reported. BCMWLAN Will dump. 

I'm thinking some or most of the wifi problems here might be caused by a bug in the wifi driver.

So, I was having the same issues as lots of other users on my 2 yr old iphone 5, tried the various fixes/resets etc, nothing worked; then I followed the Apple recommended router setting which I found here: iOS and OS X: Recommended settings for Wi-Fi routers and access points - Apple Support  and now my wifi connection is up and running on both 2.4 & 5 GHz. All I did was change the security to WPA2 Personal (AES) (from WPA AUTO) and check that the rest of the settings were as they should be, which they were or I couldn't change on my Virgin SuperHub 2.  In fact as soon as I got to the security settings and changed them, I tried to connect and it worked for me, I didn't bother with the rest of the settings.  Give it a try, I hope it works for you.

Regards. Depeche 242.

I am already using AES, rest of the settings are also as per recommendation.

Even then my iPhone WiFi gets deactivated when iPhone goes to sleep!