Q: iOS 8 Wi-Fi problems

The problem is not DNS.

Honestly, there is NOTHING you can do but bug Apple for a fix.

You can get some marginal relief by stopping/starting wifi, or by screwing around with the multiple "tricks" that have been published here and elsewhere, which indirectly cause a wi-fi re-start. Things may look good immediately afterwards, but will deteriorate over time.

The basic problem appears to be within  the wi-fi driver.

You can see why things are bad simply by using ping.

I have a separate wifi access point (AP) (not integrated with a router, so you can forget anything people tell you about routers for this issue),

The AP is on the same sub-net as several other machines. Normally, I can ping one of these machines from the iPad (or anything else on wi-fi) and see a round trip time of about 1.2ms.

With a freshly re-booted iOS 8 on my iPad air, I now see a fairly consistent ping of about 30ms. About one packet in 20 is ~1.3ms. There are occasional outliers with pings over 100ms.

Leave it to run, and over time the number of outliers increases, as does their time.

Then you will see packets being dropped. leave it overnight and you will see something like this:

2/3 of the packets are being dropped. The very occasional packet is getting through in a reasonable time, but most of the packets which don't disappear are taking half a second or more for the round trip. This is (of course) totally unusable.

You can re-set the wi-fi driver by stop/start, fiddle with DNS, fiddle with wifi location etc, each of which will, behind the scenes cause a wifi driver reset, and things will go back to the working, but still broken (SLOW) state.

Sorry guys, there is absolutely nothing you can do to fix or work around this, other than use cell data if you have it, or stop/start wifi.

Only Apple can fix this.

Fantastic, almost 300 posts and zero response from Apple (ok i jumped a few pages), still the problem exists and no word of confirmation i believe.

I was getting worried if this was just my phone that was behaving strange or my provider but after a quick google i saw this is iOS8 issue. I'm using 5S here and it was working great before the update, my network is 50Mbit and speed test can go from 47,3 down to 0.04 using ookla speedtest.

I have only enabled one band on the router which is the 2.4GHz,

Apple please let us know what your plan is.

I encountered this issue since earlier last week.  I run the Bria softphone on my ipad and until I corrected the DNS issue I would have agreed but the DNS did fix it for me.

I agree this is only a patch and Apple needs to fix it, and who's to say this will not break either, but I have not had any more issues since that correction and voice calls require a constant data stream when connected.

you are 100% right. I came to the same conclusion after testing all kind of ways, even a fresh install of a erased iPad. But the driver problem does not affect all products the same way i guess, since the WiFi chipset is not the same in all iPads/iPhones. Most incredible is the total absence from Apple in this matter, with so many posts and so many people having this problem. Only thing to do sadly is to wait for 8.01.

Didn't work for me.

They have no plan other than to remain silent.

I believe this (remaining silent) was the original response to the Maps issue that was an embarrassment to them also, then they finally apologized publicly for the snafu.

It is very frustrating for me. I should have known better than to download iOS8 so fast. I usually wait a couple of weeks until the bugs are out.

No problems here in the UK with our "family" iPads, 4s, 5's and 5s's all good on wifi with iOS8 upgrade? Maybe a local to you problem?

No, I'm in UK and had the problems. I sorted a workaround I outlined above (using 2.4GHz band and/or fixing channel 5Ghz to 44 rather than auto.)

My iPad Mini was reduced to little more than a paperweight immediately upon my upgrading to iOS 8. For 36 hours I scrambled to find a resolution to a multitude of troubles, to no avail. I then found the reversion process, and switched back to v. 7.1.2. I inadvertently lost a large chunk of data during the process, which I would still have if I wasn't forced to make the downgrade. The device's performance was restored to perfect performance however. I am desparate for Apple to fix the new operating system so that we users of the older, yet otherwise wonderful devices can, can benefit from the new version. Hopefully, when 8.1 comes out all will be repaired, and I might even salvage my data. But the new version is so totally defunct in its current form, I can't imagine they will come up with a rewrite for months.....if they are planning to address or issues at all. at this point I'm so angry with the fiasco, I am starting to reconsider (ugh) Android. Apple; please do the right thing and restore my faith in your products.

The YouTube video on changing the DNS to 8.8.8.8 did not change anything for me, neither did "renewing lease".  I continue to have a whole host of issues that were not there prior to the iOS 8 update.  Safarai is a nightmare, apps not working correctly or not at all - on and on and on.  My iPhone 5 now showing almost 20,000 emails  but there are no emails.  Resets do NOTHING!

Apple - I'm feeling a lot of hatred for you about now!

Finally, someone talking sense.  There is nothing we can fix until Apple sends us the fix.

To my mind, as was suggested much earlier in this string, the problem probably comes from the iOS 8 feature of MAC randomization.

When you do something on your network, the connection is made with your Wifi router and it works fine for a while.  That is until iOS 8 decides you shouldn't be tracked and changes your MAC address.  At that point, it would seem, the connection has to be reset and either the Wifi router gets confused about who they are communicating with (since a new MAC address would imply a new device), or there is, at the very least, a break in the communication.

I don't really understand the technology very well, but this seems to be a logical explanation which explains the symptoms everyone has been getting.

I am also having this problem on iPad 2, 4, and Air.  Seams to work again when I Hard Reboot the Devices.

Also The notifications are acting up, the reminders widget does not want to show up at times.

Similar problem to me: from time to time a need to reboot my timecapsule since my iPad Air  wifi connection hangs unexpectedly.

Was perfectly working with iOS 7.

Definetively Apple needs to take quick action!!!! 

MAC randomization? That would be very stupid, many networks use the MAC address as part of their security. Filter the connections by the MAC address. So if you change that all the time you will make a lot of trouble, also if it happens that or randomize to a number already connected, one is going to be rejected. Where did you saw that of the MAC randomization?

I posted about this earlier,

http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/06/09/mac-address-randomization-joins-apples -heap-of-ios-8-privacy-improvements

also direct from apple

http://devstreaming.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/715xx4loqo5can9/715/715_user_priv acy_in_ios_and_os_x.pdf