iPhone forgetting WiFi settings
When I got the iPhone, I configured WiFi to be on by default, and joined both my home and work networks. After a few days, I noticed that when I come home, the password dialog pops up whenever it tries to connect to the WiFi network. On some occasions, even after entering the correct password, it would fail to connect.
After scouring forums and reading endless posts, I believe I know what’s going on. Apple’s WiFi adapter doesn’t seem to be fully compatible with modern WiFi hardware. Shall I dare suggest it’s buggy?
Here are the things I did, which I believe fixed the problem:
1) Reset the iPhone’s network profiles: Settings > General > Reset > Reset Network Settings.
I don’t think that’s absolutely necessary, but it starts you off with a known fresh baseline and eliminate any other potential configuration issues.
2) Go into your WiFi access point, and disable 40MHz channel widths (not recommended on 2.4GHz anyway), and disable automatic wireless channel selection. I am using a LinkSys WRT-320N with DD-WRT v24-sp2 firmware, so both these settings are under Wireless > Basic Settings. Here is the configuration screen of the wireless interface:
I believe this solved the issue for me. While I have no issue with the 20MHz channel width setting (it was set to auto before), I am bummed about having to set it to a fixed channel. In auto channel mode, it selects the quietest channel, which allows best performance for you and your neighbours. Fixing it to a set channel means I have to periodically scan the WiFi networks around my home and choose the quietest channel manually. Note that channel 14 is shown here for illustration purposes only. I will update this post if I discover anything further.
Tags: Forget password, iPhone, Network settings, WiFi