The WiFi icon at the top of the screen has a little “x” on it. When I go to the network settings page, it will say “Connected, no internet.” How can it be connected and “no internet”? Isn’t “connected” the very definition of being on the internet?
Sometimes if I turn WiFi off then on again, internet becomes accessible. But not always. I just turned it off (WiFi, not the phone) and turned it on again… still “connected, no internet.”
Do I have a setting toggled that disconnects from the internet (even though WiFi is still on) after some period of inactivity or something? Is this a bug or a feature?
Can someone 'splain this to me?
ETA: I did some googling on this and one suggestion was to click “reset network settings,” which I did the other day. Didn’t fix the problem. I’ve reset the router a couple of times. No fix.
WiFi works on computer. Sometimes this problem happens on my kindle (which is also Android), but rarely. Have also restarted phone numerous times.
Poking through the settings, I found something called “Passpoint,” which is supposed to facilitate WiFi connection. It was off. I turned it on. Was that a good idea?
ETA: No. The “connected, no internet” message just came up. I’m stumped.
My wifi router is separate from my cable modem. In my case, the answer is simple: The wifi router is working fine but the cable modem is not working right or cable is out. In that case, I reboot the cable modem. If that doesn’t fix it, I call the cable company and they threaten to extort a bunch of money out of me to find the solution until they grudgingly admit that it’s a problem on their end that they will get around to fixing. Occasionally, I get this message when nothing seems to be wrong with the cable modem or internet access. In that case, I just disconnect and reconnect to the wifi. My phone will cycle pretty quickly from “no wifi,” to “wifi/no internet,” and back to “wifi connected.” I think it takes a moment longer to connect to the internet services than it takes to connect to the wifi router itself.
Your WiFi network and the internet are two networks. You can be connected to WiFi, but have no connection to the internet. WiFi is a network created by your router, so you can think of it as being connected to the router, but the router not being connected to the internet. Devices connected to your WiFi could still talk to each other if they are configured that way, but they wouldn’t be able to access anything outside the premises.
Reboot the router is pretty solid advice in any connection issue. Phone your provider for assistance if it’s ongoing or frequent.
Concur. Even if your wifi router and cable modem are housed within the same box, they’re still two separate connections. You can be on your wifi and have connectivity to other devices on your home network (shared printers, network drives, etc.) but no connectivity to the internet.
Think of it like being snowed in: you can still walk around inside your house, but you can’t go to the store.
This is helpful. I don’t have cable or satellite. Only TV is OTA or streaming on my Roku. There’s never a problem with streaming-- that’s WiFi, too, isn’t it? I have AT&T for WiFi/internet and for my cell service. They are not bundled. I get two separate bills.
Restarting the phone doesn’t always fix it.
Are y’all saying I need to reboot the router every time this happens? That could be multiple times in an hour. Time to call AT&T?
We have a similar problem. Occasionally it requires a restart of the wifi on the device, sometimes a restart of the device and sometimes only restarting the modem/router works.
An analogy would be the postal system. You know where your post office is and can get mail there, but there could be a postal strike, or you could have weird amnesia that made you forget how zip codes work. In both cases you would still know where the post office was (be connected to wifi) but not be on the internet (be able to send out mail).
I’ve run into this a lot. With a house full of many kids, everyone with phones, laptops and tablets of various brands, also tv’s trying to connect, we would run into issues like this.
It seems like it was due to IP address conflicts, some devices holding onto IP addresses during idle state then trying to use it after the router had reassigned it to a different device. Once I put in hard-coded IP addresses based on device mac address, it eliminated about 99% of this type of problem.
Sometimes, but much more rare was the cable box reset issue.
I’ve run into this where you have to manually connect to a network, either by giving the password or accepting the terms of use. So, yes it’s possible for your phone to detect a wifi network, but you have to take an additional step to connect to the internet.
A probably better analogy is a land-line phone–“Wi-Fi connected” is saying that you have a dial tone, not that your call has gone through (or even been dialed.) The internet connection through the Wi-Fi is like you have dialed the person and they have answered.
This is a really common problem. IP addresses are assigned to a device for a fixed period of time. But something sometimes goes wrong and a device thinks it has an IP address but doesn’t or some such issue.
Setting it up in the router so all you commonly connected devices have a fixed IP address is good idea for this and other reasons.
(All of which is completely contradictory to the “just let the devices manage it” attitude that presumes that everything works perfectly all the time. I.e., not real life.)
