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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.
aren't they used to pay more anyways?
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.
The carriers really hate that "feature".
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
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)
I'm leaving it on because it's damn useful.
When I'm leaving work the phone would grab onto the ever more remote WiFi, creating a kind of dead zone in the parking lot where the WiFi was too weak.
When I'm at an airport with crappy WiFi I'd rather have the phone jump ship.
Or if you auto-join some pay network you used before but don't have an account for at the moment...
All are great cases for why this makes the experience of using the device better.
Shouldn't you just leave it on an monitor data use for cellular to see if it looks like you are using significantly more data? The article is no good in that regard because it's quoting a report from a beta version of iOS9, which may have been using lots more data for all kinds of reasons.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Doesn't iOS have a data usage threshold thingy that you can set anyway to warn you when you get to X, and really warn you when you get to Y?
I would imagine that WiFi Asssssisst would simply bow out at X.
Android has had this feature for years and it hasn't killed my bill.
I haven't had much seat time with it but my general impression is unless you have really shitty wireless it won't kick on. And if you have wireless that shitty then perhaps you want it to kick on.
...and people still have to deal with metered internet usage.
Pitiful.
Just price it in (it already is) and be done with it. Jeez.
I hope it's just the data cap and not data roaming on by default as that can cost you $15-$20 a MEG or a the cost of a NEW CAR FOR 1-2GB of data.
My Carrier(Bell) sends me a text message when I am approaching my data plan cap. iOS doesn't have anything be default. You may be able to get an app for it. I think in Canada the warning is now mandated due to the number of people running over limits without knowing.
sorry, not reading the article. But doesn't an iPhone automatically fallback to cellular data when out of wifi range? I'm pretty sure mine does.
What's new here? Is it faster? More fault-tollerant?
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!
good thing i've still got the unlimited data! i KNEW i wasn't just throwing money away!
They blame the phone for ... the carriers lack of coverage and their idiotic idea of charging extra after blowing through the data caps?
I'm not an Apple user, never will be, but isn't this kind of stupid to blame them for the carriers problems?
wireless plan here in the USA. Additionally, AT&T recently increased the throttle cap from 5GB to 22GB. I'm paying $64/month, by the way.
How can you exceed a data cap? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what a data cap is. Where I come from a data cap is implemented on your provider's servers/switches/exchanges, you set the cap via a web interface and it caps your downloads (as in you can no longer download anything) when you have reached X dollars/euros/etc... or Y bytes where X or Y can be set to whatever value you prefer. If the cap is exceeded despite you explicitly setting it to some value its their own damn fault and they have to eat the costs.
The sad thing is the feature is based solely on signal strength.
I did a test where I just yanked the ethernet cable out of the back of my Wifi access point, effectively creating a "wifi island" with no internet access.
Everything stopped working and the phone did NOT switch to cellular without turning Wifi off.
I think this situation, a wifi network with a broken or overloaded uplink, is more common than a weak signal, and should have been anticipated as well when implementing this feature.
I'm paying $50 a month for my unlimited. Plans have gotten cheaper.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
No data plan. It's WiFi or nothing.
Have gnu, will travel.
To be fair, IOS 9 was released and is no longer beta and WiFi Assist is still a thing.
This was the first feature I turned off when I got my rose gold iPhone 6s this past weekend. I typically use about 600MB per month and rarely bumped up against the 1GB on Sprint.
To be fair, the reports the story were based on WERE from the beta, not from the final release.
THAT is fair.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No, not a problem. If I'm "wandering" then I'm not using my phone. I've got 300mb a month, on purpose. I've got wifi and home and at work so why pay a lot of money for data I don't need. It's not that hard to just stop using the phone when wandering.
As far as I can tell, the feature doesn't give a shit what you're using the network for. It operates below the application layer, so it doesn't have a clue. It simply notices that the Wifi network is bad (whatever definition of bad Apple engineers chose) and drops the connection in favor of cellular. That's it. I've seen it happen in my apartment. (My Wifi AP is in a room which is essentially a steel cage, so signal often drops out at the other end of the apartment.)
I am a Comcast customer and everyone using their "home gateway" (most customers) are providing free, limited bandwidth access to other Internet customers who are within range. As I walk the dogs I find that I am almost continuously connecting to one house or another. Same when driving around. My phone checks for adequate performance when connecting, but hangs onto the connection even though throughput is about 10 bytes per second. and, even when the signal is lost, it takes about 20 seconds before giving up.
I am forced to turn off WiFi to listen to stream or even get a sports score update. Then I get home and forget to turn on the WiFi and THAT is when I waste a bunch of my data allowance.
As to not noticing the switch-over, streaming apps do have a noticeable "glitch" when moving from WiFi to LTE. It's quite likely that you would notice. The app has to detect the change, open a connection via the LTE address and start the new stream running before the buffer empties... when the low quality can only be detected until the buffer is already shrinking rapidly. There are several tricks apps can use to minimize the delay, but I have yet to find one that does the switch transparently on audio, let alone video.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
Why do have my phone set up to hang onto wifi until it's completely gone and to heavily restrict data use when on cellular? Not because I have a crappy data plan - on the contrary.
It's all about battery life: pushing data across a flakey wifi link still consumes less enery than using [234]G. A function that tries to 'enhance your user experience' at the expense of battery life defeats its purpose, as nothing is as user-experience-killing as a low battery warning.
Android has had this feature for ever... I haven't heard of anybody forgetting to disable it when they don't want it. Also, doesn't iOS come with a bandwidth watcher like Android? My phone shuts off data when I hit 95% of my cap.
No kidding. I looked into them a while ago when I broke a phone still on contract. Good prices, they'd buy me out of my contract, yada, yada, yada....
Talked to a couple coworkers who have T-Mobile and share my 120mile round trip commute. It works great, unless you want a data connection......70% of my commute corridor has no T-Mobile data coverage at all. Don't get me wrong, my AT&T unlimited data coverage often sucks, but it works fine where I spend most of my time.
I think I'll pass on T-Mobile for the time being.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
There's no reason to turn off SSID broadcast. When the router stops broadcasting SSID, every device that has that AP added will broadcast that SSID around everywhere - even when not near the AP. So...even less secure.
Unless you want to connect to a wifi island without manually turning this off. Say if you're a computer tech and want to troubleshoot a wireless router that's not getting Internet.
And wouldn't it be good for it stop working in this case to alert you to the problem? Everyone complaining about hitting data caps as a result of this change would prefer it this way.
I'm sure it's not based on signal strength alone. Maybe SNR or the ability to route packets at all.
Your data plan usage ALWAYS goes up on the beta releases. They do a ton of instrumentation and telemetry. It's also partly to blame for the extra shitty battery life you get from the beta releases.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
I don't know...I'd say about 80% of people who have a grandfathered unlimited plan are iPhone users who have been iPhone users from the beginning.
Around me, it's certainly not a myth. I switched from T-Mo to Cricket (AT&T towers) last year, and I noticed a decided improvement in my coverage. I was happy enough with T-Mobile since i don't really make many calls anyway, but there were certain routes where Pandora would drop on T-Mo & the Cricket data is uninterrupted.
Visit any rural area and you can experience the myth for yourself. Sprint too.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
My wii-fi connections are so poor and/or secured that I have never been able to download iOS9 and my current OS will not allow me to use my UNLIMITED cellular connection for downloads. I have an iPhone that has NEVER been able to upgrade itself or to back itself up because of this stupid limitation, which I presume is imposed on me because at&t wants to freeload on other people's bandwidth.
So's ad blocking. I switched to iOS 9 as fast as I could because of that. Not only is it much easier and safer to use Mobile Safari, but it probably means I'm saving bandwidth overall.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes