iPhone XS Max Weak 5GHz WIFI Reception

Add me to the list. I can barely connect to my WiFi. But, I was at my sisters house and connected to her WiFi, and I had no problems at all. It was super fast. I’ve visited the Verizon store, and they looked over all my settings. Then, I contacted Verizon’s higher level of tech support. They had me reset my network settings- which seemed to help briefly. My problem is better than it was, but it’s still an issue. And, I can’t go back to my 8 plus, because I traded it in for this XS. Ugh!

The fact that at your sisters it was super fast, yet at your house it's not demonstrates this is a compatibility issue with some routers. I would hope that means an update can solve this for you and all the other's having this issue.

Not at all. The fact that one person has a connection issue in one location over another location doesn't imply a compatibility issue with the router... That's just not entirely true. Teri2225, Check the location of the router at home where you're having the issue. Are you having issues when you're in the same room? And then the connection drops off as you move further away? In my case, My connection drops in an area that I haven't had any issues with at all on any of my other iDevices, nor on any of my friends/parents iDevices (all different models). This is definitely a signal issue on the Phone, not on the router. Also, at some point in this forum someone mentioned that you can try updating your Router's Firmware... No. Most ISP's control that setting on their end. Not user serviceable.

Not seeing any change (good or bad) after installing build 16B5084a. I also received a reply back from the Apple Tech I was initially working with, and he’s saying I should just call AppleCare Support so they can gather more logs and do more troubleshooting. I’m just going to return the phone. This is way too much trouble for a $1500 phone.

Yup. Again, been there done that. I left apple all together a few days ago..... I don’t have time for games and data logging which proves nothing.... it’s all fake. Apple is not currently working on the LTE issues. You know what they’re doing?.... GROUP FACETIME AND ANIMOJIS!! Hahah. What a waste. I gave up after my 5th replacement from all different locations. I only own an iPhone x and dumped all my apple products. Macs, pods, and 10 iPhones from 5s-8....

I got a very similar result with my iPhone 6S Plus vs the XS Max. The issue is actually much more pronounced when further away from the AP in question. I can achieve almost the same speeds close to the AP, but about 20 feet (and a wall) away, the 6S Plus still has more than 2 to 10 times the performance of the XS Max right next to it, and many more lost packets (0 vs 2-4%).

I just went back to the 8 plus. I got rid of my X as well. The honeymoon didn’t last long with the second Xs. I’m not quite ready to throw my hands up completely with Apple, but this is disappointing. I am finding the 8 more reliable, more smooth in functionality than both the X and Xs. There may be some perception on my part but this is where I am at. 🏼♀

Actually we don’t need to explain why your phone is perfect. We need to figure why ours can’t even match the performance of our previous iPhones in identical locations. I am so glad I didn’t trade in my iPhone 7. I‘ll keep using it until Apple either sells me an XS that has similar 5K WiFi and LTE performance or ships an iphone XI next year that fixes the weak antenna gain that they seem to have designed in to this years phone. It’s too bad because I really wanted the new camera capabilities, form factor etc.

Want some evidence on Apple designing sub par antenna performance in this years phones?

take a moment to check Apples very own submission to the American FCC outlining the radio performance in the new iPhones.

https://www.wiwavelength.com/2018/09/iphone-xs-and-xs-max-mostly-fail-to.html

and what they can do about it at this stage of iPhone release

https://www.wiwavelength.com/2018/09/antennagate-reduxs-if-so-what-can-apple.htm l

I’m wondering if the XR to be released soon will show a higher priority for antenna gain design.

It doesn’t seem to make a difference for me whether I am in the same room as the router, or a room away. My house is 1100 sq ft, and I have had times of great performance, and times of zero performance. So I can’t figure out if it’s an antenna issue, or a combo of that and my router. None of our other devices seem to have any problems at all. My husband has the XS also, and he seems to have less issues than I do. I should add that when I am not connected to WiFi, I don’t seem to have any problems. I was at work in a basement, on LTE, and I had no issues at all. But the first 6 days I had this phone I couldn’t get it to do anything on my WiFi. I hope they figure this out, and I hope it can be fixed with a software update.

I changed the name of my router’s 2GHz BSSID and kept the 5GHz the same, and then reset network settings on my iPhone XS Max and I seem to be doing alright at the moment. I’m sitting in my living room, where I’ve been having these problems, and now I’m ok. Still not as strong of a signal, I can see the bars dropping and going back up again and again. I’m sure that’d be when it’d be failing over to the 2GHz band. So this is more of a bandaid than a fix. AppleCare Support wants me to head to a store so they can look at it and I really don’t want to deal with that at all. lol

I’m having same exact issues. My 3 year old iPhone 6 had much better cellular reception. Mine is terrible. Apple needs to fix this. Paying premium for these phones and the expectations are that we’d at least get get equal reception.

I hate my WiFi connections as well, especially when I FaceTime. I never had any problems with any of my previous iPhones that I owned . FaceTime calls are sometimes laggy and choppy. I had iPhones since the 4 and by far this XS Max is the worst phone i ever ouwmdt

If this can help a little, my issue is mainly with Wifi, and I've found the following:

By forcing my wifi controller to switch the clients to the 5 GHz band, some performance issues have been alleviated. Originally, I had fast performance (up to my ISP's speed, 130 Mb/s) whenever I was close to the AP, but when I was a little further away, both my iPad (6th gen) and my iPhone 6S Plus had maximum speed on speedtest.net, but my iPhone XS Max was limited to about 10 Mb/s and had switched to the 2.4 GHz band. By limiting it to the 5 GHz band, the performance was back, but it had a little less reach than my older devices.

I still have some unresolved issue on the 5 GHz band though, as I sometimes get "not connected to the Internet" messages from some apps, even when near the AP. This seems to related to short losses of connections.

Hope this helps.

I must have changed the setting awhile ago and forgot about it. My iPhone X wasn't affected with having the Power Save Support: ON, yet It definatly effected my XS Max. I ended up turning the No-Acknowledgement & Power Save Support to the default setting which is OFF. I turned WMM Support back ON and haven't had any disconnects from my 5G Wifi.

I returned my XS max to the Apple store today, received a new one. No difference at all! Still slow or loosing 5 Ghz signal in the living room while the iPhone 7 has all bars on 5 Ghz. I only have 5 Ghz enabled on my router at home.