I use wifi at various bars, breweries, restaurants, cafes, etc without problem. However, there’s one brewery where my iPhone connects as expected, but if I try to download/read/whatever it doesn’t work. In fact, if I turn off wifi I can use my data and it works just fine. Other people have wifi working for them just fine. This is not a situation caused by wifi being overloaded, it happens even if I’m the only one using it.
Is there an explanation for this, and is there a workaround?
Some public wifi requires you to sign in through a web page and accept some sort of agreement before you can freely use it. Could that be what’s going on here?
I do all that, and my phone shows that I’m connected.
Have you run a speed test to check your connection?
Also, what type of phone and do you get any error messages?
My phone is an iPhone 6splus. If I run a speed test at home, my phone gets the same numbers as my gf’s phone, my tablet, etc. If I try to run a speed test at the problematic brewery, I cannot even get to the speed test web page while connected to their wifi.
This is usually caused by some DNS issue.
Any thoughts on why it would only cause problems with my phone, and how to fix the situation?
Poke around in the DNS settings page, and see if it is set to something non-standard:
Thanks! Gives me an excuse to go to the brewery. “Where are you going?” “Gotta fix the internets, don’t wait up!”
Did you try to ‘forget this network’ in wifi settings? and then resign on?
Do you try to access questionable sites, like this one?
I don’t have a good explanation, but I just experienced this today with my wife’s iPhone 6S, ironically in an Apple store. My Google Pixel 3 connected to the Apple store wifi just fine, and I was killing time with it waiting our turn. My wife’s phone would connect to the wifi, but wouldn’t get online. She ended up just using her mobile data to browse while we waited our turn. We were not there about problems with the 6S. I did not spend anytime playing with her phone to see if I could find the problem.
I have had it happen to my phone before. In those cases it is often that I am not receiving an IP address through DHCP for some reason. Maybe the network is out of addresses to assign, which if that’s the case the establishment needs to fire whoever did the setup. In other cases I get an address, but can’t access the internet. My guess is that in some instances the network is broken for everybody, and the people I see using phones are using their mobile data.
The cause of the problem could exist anywhere between the device in your hand and the site you are trying to reach, so it can be impossible to diagnose these problems based only on a description of the failure.
I’ve found that whenever I try to access the WiFi at Lowe’s, I have to forget it (from my previous visit) and search for it again. Then, once I try to connect, it will bring me to their “I agree to all the terms” page. I can’t get that login page if I try to connect to the saved WiFi, for some reason.