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iOS 9 'Wi-Fi Assist' Could Lead To Huge Wireless Bills
Dave Knott writes: One of the new features introduced in iOS9 is "Wi-Fi Assist." This enables your phone to automatically switch from Wi-Fi to a cellular connection when the Wi-Fi signal is poor. That's helpful if you're in the middle of watching a video or some other task on the internet that you don't want interrupted by spotty Wi-Fi service. Unfortunately, Wi-Fi Assist is enabled by default, which means that users may exceed their data cap without knowing it because their phone is silently switching their data connection from Wi-Fi to cellular.
Turning off Wi-fi assist now.
It's located at: Settings -> Cellular -> W-Fi Assist (all the way at the bottom). Yes, it was turned on by default, which I've now disabled.
I have a question about wifi-assist: If it kicks in doesn't it tell the phone wifi is off? I ask because iOS prevents lots of things from happening over a cellular connection. For example: You cannot do a system update, you cannot download apps larger than a certain file size (last I checked it was 50 megabytes), and apps like Netflix have a "don't use cellular" switch. It seems to me that, assuming that those switches aren't bypassed, the likelihood of a ridiculous bill seems minimal.
Pardon my skepticism, I'm one of the grandfathered unlimited customers with shitty wifi at work who is continually annoyed by these artificial limitations. I'd actually benefit from it if Apple went that far out of their way and fucked up that bad.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
A bigger problem in 9 and 9.0.1 is that you cant turn on and off cellular for any app including app store and itunes if you turn them on they turn them self back off.
Apples saying wait for 9.0.2
80 bucks a month and you can use it.
Really sad fan boy.
users may exceed their data cap without knowing it
That never happens without knowing it on Verizon. I get texts and emails when I reach 75%, 90%, 100% and then at each GB over the limit.
I have a teenage son. I get a lot of these notices.
I can see the fnords!
I find it useful to disable apps like Netflix from using the cellular network. Settings > Cellular, toggle it off.
Well, you should notice, I don't see how netflix could automagically start streaming to your new IP address, so most likely, you will have to restart the stream from the beginning. This makes the following sentence from TFS a bunch of mumbo jumbo:
That's helpful if you're in the middle of watching a video or some other task on the internet that you don't want interrupted by spotty Wi-Fi service.
It will get interrupted anyway...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
It covers the time when you walk away from WiFi and the phone can still see the WiFi, but data packets are failing. And it does so transparently and without waiting for (longish) time out.
So there's no failed page load or dropped video on iOS9 like there would be on iOS8 or any other mobile OS.
There's 2 places I consistently get hit with that. My work car park, and this one particular bit of road where there's a WiFi network on a known cloud service. The work car park one is particularly annoying because I usually want to do something on the phone as I leave work.
It's the feature I'm most looking forward to when I get a 6s.
Yep. The iPhone has always seamlessly jumped from wifi to cellular when the wifi drops. All this does is improve the user experience as previously it would default to wifi if it could see the network at all, resulting in degraded service. This new feature will only cost you "hundreds of dollars" if you are generally in the habit of watching netflix sitting in your car parked at the curb outside your house. You know, the times when you wouldn't want to be on wifi anyway because you are close enough to see the network, but not close enough to get a good signal, so your browsing experience feels like 1998.
Most streaming video these days is over HTTP, divided up into many small chunks sent over HTTP. I'm pretty sure on iOS, even Netflix does Apple's HLS (a protocol, not a service Apple sits in the middle of) which was designed to make exactly this (among other things) work. I believe YouTube and Netflix both do DASH as well, which also makes this work.
What it comes down to is this: Netflix doesn't start "automagically streaming to your new IP address." The video is divided up into many small requests, and your device starts making those requests from a new IP address.