attwifi - ios11 - option to forget

Did you ever find a solution to this problem? How are other people not screaming about this? It is a serious problem that you are forced to connect to, what is usually, terrible wifi. I am in a city and my phone connects to these stupid hotspots constantly when I am walking down the street no matter what the signal strength is and it seriously slows down my connectivity.

Plus, I never, ever want to connect to a hotspot unless I specifically tell my device to, even AT&T's.

You may want to see if there is a profile on your phone for this. However, I can tell you if you ever connected to public wifi at Starbucks, an AT&T corporate store, McDonalds, or a host of others, you will see that wi-fi, and can connect to it again, depending on your settings. You will have to be somewhere near it to see it listed on your phone to be able to forget that network, but I've never experienced an issue forgetting it if I had connected. I did once at a Starbucks to send a large file via email, and then after it sent, I forgot the network, and it was gone.

There is not an option to forget or to turn auto-join off and the attwifi connection isn't synced to other devices, i.e., doesn't show up in the "Preferred Networks" on a Mac.

After some more digging it looks like it is in the carrier settings and may be related to WiFi calling.

OP, do you have WiFi calling enabled?

I am currently not near an attwifi hotspot but I am going to check later when I am to see if turning WiFi calling off will let me disable the auto-join of the AT&T WiFi. Even if that is the issue it shouldn't be. Nobody should force you to connect to a WiFi hotspot unless you want to. You should not have to choose whether you want WiFi calling enabled or protecting your phone connection, or be forced to keep disabling WiFi altogether. I use WiFi calling because the cellular connection in my warehouse isn't good but the WiFi is. I don't want to be forced onto a WiFi network just because I'm near a McDonald's.

If this is the case, I'm probably going to be moving over to T-Mobile. Best benefits of unlocked phones and no contracts is that you aren't forced to put up with the carriers' stupidity.

You never mentioned wi-fi calling with AT&T. If you have wi-fi calling turned on, then that is probably what you are seeing, and that is wi-fi networks belonging to AT&T that are enhancing your wi-fi calling experience. I would contact AT&T then to verify that issue. They are not forcing you to connect to their hotspots, you volunteered to do that when you activated their wi-fi calling.

I would ask T-Mobile the same questions if they support wi-fi calling as well. And I would make sure if they do not have wi-fi calling that they have sufficient signal in the areas you frequent with your phone. I know that in my area around home and where I frequent, I wouldn't switch to T-Mobile if they paid me to switch and paid me every month to use it. They have terrible coverage here.

I didn’t mention WiFi calling because since it was introduced you have not been forced to connect to AT&T’s WiFi.

Up to now you have always been able to “forget” AT&T’s wifi and not auto-join them, even with WiFi calling on.

The service has never used AT&T’s WiFi to enhance service, it has used WiFi to enhance service, any WiFi.

More than just a WiFi phone call travels over that connection and we should be in control of whether we connect to WiFi.

So, what did AT&T say when you asked them about this wi-fi network that your phone is being forced to connect to? I also was not aware that AT&T had a wi-fi network that would cover an entire area like that. Now, I do not have AT&T wi-fi calling turned on for my phone, but I could ask my son tomorrow about his. He uses it where he is at a university. As I look at my Settings>Wi-Fi, I do not see something like that is my area. I believe you should be able to get information from AT&T as to what is going on. But the only places I've seen any Wi-fi that has att in it is what I have seen at the locations I mentioned.

Well, I was at my dentist this morning and saw that my phone had again automatically connected to WiFi. I checked and it was attwifi. However, it was labelled as "attwifi - Passpoint".

When you check the information on that network there are no options to "Auto-join" or "Forget this network".

So I went into settings and turned off WiFi Calling and went back to the network information and lo and behold the "Auto-join" option was back.

I disabled the Auto-join and then went back and turned on WiFi Calling and it no longer automatically connected. I don't know if it is going to reset after a period of time or after restarting my phone. I didn't have a lot of time to test all scenarios at the dentist's office.

This "Passpoint" thing had me intrigued so I did some digging and this was a new WiFi setup that AT&T implemented in January 2016. It uses WPA2 encryption and devices that are configured appropriately will automatically connect and login to these hotspots without any captive portal or user intervention. The idea was to ensure a more secure connection and to eliminate man in the middle spoofing of an AT&T hotspot.

According to AT&T's info here https://passpoint.attwifi.com/ an iPhone needs a Passpoint profile installed to automatically connect. However, my phone does not have any profile installed. I imagine that they updated the carrier settings to "force" configure the phone to work with Passpoint if WiFi Calling is enabled, perhaps to coincide with the iOS11 release.

If anybody else finds themselves in this situation and wants to test out my method for disconnecting and not Auto-joining, please do and report back with their results. If you are auto-joining and don't have WiFi calling enabled and/or you have a profile for Passpoint post that as well.

https://www.guidingtech.com/57078/get-back-forget-network-ios-setting-disappears /