Watch not connecting to wifi when bluetooth on iPhone is switched off

You can't do it. The WiFi on the Watch is only used to pair with an iPhone - you can't use it to connect directly to a WiFi network.

One result is that, if you switch off the phone, the Watch has nothing to connect to

I see what you mean - I misread your original post, sorry.

I've just tested by switching off Bluetooth on the phone and sending a text message and it worked. Also pinging the phone from the watch worked.

I'm in a cafe at present, using their wifi. I have at home a similar setup to yours - I'll try when I get home and see if I get the same result

P.S. Shame on you for actually reading the manual 🙂

It took me a while to get this working at home too, mainly because I don't broadcast my SSID, and it looks like iOS 8.3 may have a bit of a bug in it around this.

Anyway, after turning SSID broadcast back on and reconnecting my iPhone to the network, I was then able to turn off bluetooth on my iPhone and the watch could ping the phone. I then re-hid the SSID, and had to reconnect my iPhone yet again, but it now seems to be working OK.

So, I guess my advice is unhide your network if you do.

Just checked this at home - Airport Extreme bas station, 2.4 and 5. Switched off BT and it the watch remains connected.

I broadcast my SSID, so Lothos might be onto something

MAC address filtering and static IP assignments are the other 2 things I had 2 fiddle with.

If you're not using fixed IP address and MAC assignments, you ought to be able to ignore this. You could try restarting the AEBS

Not a lot 😟

So your setup is Internet -> Netgear -> AEBS ->iPhone?

This might be something to do with IP addresses. Where do your devices (PCs, phones, whatever, get their network address from? The Netgear or the AEBS? Another version of the same question - which is acting as DHCP server? If the question doesn't make sense, just say so

If the AEBS is doing DHCP, trying rebooting it