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Introduction
In this post, I’m going to talk about some issues I had with connectivity on my iPhone recently and how I fixed them, in case it helps you too!
What was happening
In recent weeks I had been frustrated by frequent (but short) periods where my iPhone would refuse to load a webpage or connect to services on the internet.
It would not show any obvious errors at all at system level, no popups etc. It would simply be doing nothing then burst into life.
Troubleshooting
I tried various things to troubleshoot, none of which worked:
- Enable/Disable Airplane mode
- Close and restart the app/browser
- Clear browser cache
- Restart the phone
My phone is an iPhone 14 Pro Max, running iOS 17.2.1.
My wife has the same phone and was not having the issue.
Our iPad running the latest iPadOS was also not experiencing the issue.
I then wondered if I had maybe set some settings that weren’t set on the other Apple devices such as:
Again, toggling these off made no difference.
I then tried just disabling WiFi and had the first lead…
No issue on 4G and 5G mobile data - enable WiFi again and the issue immediately returned.
But then no other device in my house connected to my Unifi Dream Machine (UDM) had any issues, which rules out the router, and the ISP router that is operating solely as a modem.
This also ruled out the ISP as well.
So what could be causing it?
Looking at the client devices list on the UDM, I noticed that my phone was being identified by the router as an iPhone 15, whereas my wife’s was showing as the correct model.
Told the UDM to reconnect my phone - issue persisted.
Done some googling and found this Apple support chat which reckoned that fixes in iOS 17.2 to fix long running WiFi issues for many people have actually made things worse.
None of the “fixes”(workarounds) were applicable (I don’t have an iPhone 15 so it’s not a WiFi 6 issue for example).
I decided, before giving up and doing a factory reset of the phone, to simply delete the saved WiFi profile and set it up again and… 48 hours of trouble free connectivity later, I can say that was a success!
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