iPhone connects to home wi-fi, but cannot access internet

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Level 1

12 points

iPhone connects to home wi-fi, but cannot access internet

For the last few weeks I've been having a problem with connecting my iPhone to my wi-fi at home.

My iPhone connects to the wi-fi network and shows a strong signal, but it cannot access the internet. If I go to settings and forget my home wi-fi network, then restart the phone, the phone can be successfully connected to the home wi-fi after restarting and everything works fine. However, if I leave the house and then return home later, the phone will go back to not being able to access the internet when it re-joins the home wi-fi.

I suspect that there is some issue between the wi-fi router and the iPhone, and I have tried to configure the phone using both DHCP and a static IP address (reserved for the phone's mac address in my router). My suspicions here arose as I noticed that DHCP would occasionally give the phone a 169.254.x.x address (reserved for DHCP configuration failures), and I also noticed that occasionally my phone's DNS setting would be set to an IPv6 address even though I have IPv6 disabled on the router. I have tried using static DNS settings. Using a static IP address and static DNS server seemed to have helped the first time I tried them, but after the first time of seeming to work they don't help now.

All other devices (multiple laptops, smart tv, roku, etc) that connect to my home wi-fi work fine without any issue.

Has anyone else encountered this problem, and more importantly does anyone have a solution to stop this madness?

iPhone 5, iOS 10.2.1, null

Posted on Mar 7, 2017 2:56 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Community User

Oct 31, 2017 2:36 PM in response to kevintap

I had same problem. Exactly. Your assessment is right. On iPhone I changed DNS from automatic to manual and deleted those 2 other addresses. Worked immediately. Full resolution. How did you ultimately solve?

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Answer 2

Mar 15, 2017 8:53 PM in response to kevintap

I have had the same issue! Except my phone will not access the internet regardless of what

I do. I've tried everything from forgetting the password, to doing a hard reset of my phone and the problem still persists. I have had this problem for 3 weeks and finally got my phone bill today to see that I had used 17 of the shared 25 gigs of data on the phone plan I have with my entire family of 5!! Any other suggestions?

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Answer 3

Mar 27, 2017 5:36 PM in response to kevintap

Did you figure this out? I am having the same problem but only on my devices that are wifi only. If they can connect via cellular or Ethernet they are fine. It's been a few weeks now and I don't know what else to try.

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Answer 4

kevintap Author

Level 1

12 points

Mar 28, 2017 8:15 AM in response to Lawrence Finch

In my case, I believe the problem to be related to some interaction between the DHCP server in the router and the iPhone. Despite having IPv6 disabled (or so I think), the DHCP server still seems to be providing IPv6 addresses for the DNS server and the iPhone seems to insist on acquiring IPv6 addresses. I see entries like 2001:558:feed::1 and 2001:558:feed::2 in my DNS servers list on the iPhone. For some reason, only the iPhone appears to be affected by this and all other devices that use DHCP on the network have no problems with name resolution and receive only IPv4 addresses and DNS servers.

Is there any way on the iPhone to diagnose or troubleshoot DNS? And is there any way on the iPhone to disable IPv6?

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Answer 5

elcpu

Level 7

31,481 points

Mar 28, 2017 8:28 AM in response to kevintap

FWIW, I had been a steady Linksys customer for years. A year or so ago I bought a new Linksys router and had lot of issues connecting to iOS devices. After many hours on the phone with them they send me a new one to no avail, it behaved the same. The supervisor at Linksys told me that some routers conflict with iOS and/or certain ISPs and they ended up refunding my money. I then bought a TP-Link C9 and have not had a single issue.

And also fwiw, the Linksys had a way of disabling iPv6 on the router. You can change the DNS on the iPhone to Google's or OpenDNS but it will not be a diagnostic test.

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Answer 6

elcpu

Level 7

31,481 points

Mar 7, 2017 3:03 PM in response to kevintap

Try the steps here:

If your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch won’t connect to a Wi-Fi network - Apple Support

Also check out this User Tip for additional suggestions:

Suggestions for Wi-Fi issues

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Answer 7

Mar 27, 2017 5:41 PM in response to Fleatotheyeah

Have you tried rebooting your router yet? That will usually fix WiFi problems if they only occur with your home network.

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Answer 8

Mar 27, 2017 5:53 PM in response to Lawrence Finch

Yes, many times rebooting of modem, devices in every sequence possible. I have definitely narrowed it down to wifi only devices but that's it.

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Answer 9

Mar 27, 2017 6:07 PM in response to Fleatotheyeah

Have you updated the firmware in your router? Checked for interference from other networks? (WiFi Explorer is a good app for your computer to check for interference).

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