iPhone 17 Pro / ProMax - Wifi 7 MLO considered harmful

[nsayer]

I've got Ubiquiti networking gear and when I bought it, I bought all Wifi 7 stuff and created a main network with MLO, WPA 3 and so on. All the modern standards. And for the stuff in the house that couldn't deal, there's a separate "dumbed down" network with just WPA 2, no MLO, no 6 GHz, etc.

For the most part, it's been fine.

My wife and I upgraded to the 17 Pro and ProMax. And even with 26.0.1 (which supposedly had a fix for WiFi issues), I've had to turn off MLO to have reliable connectivity.

Now, I have no doubt that if I tried to raise support issues with either Apple or Ubiquiti, they'd each point the finger at the other. And to be fair, things still work well enough even without MLO that for the most part the WAN connection is still the bottleneck despite being gigabit.

Has anyone else had any success with MLO? Maybe with other manufacturers?

 

[chown33]

See this thread:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2468042/

 

[nsayer]

See this thread:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2468042/

That doesn’t look like the same set of symptoms. I’m not having router crashes or anything like it. This is merely the phone losing its connection and being unable to reestablish it when MLO is turned on.

 

[chown33]

The symptoms could differ because the router models or mfgrs differ. However, the key factor leading to malfunction being MLO appears to be the same.

 

[mjc775]

I assume you're turning off MLO via the Ubiquiti settings. Have you tried turning off Wi-Fi 6E Mode for your connected network on the iPhone instead?

The reason I ask is because I have a Netgear Orbi WiFi 7 mesh system and get connection issues with Wi-Fi 6E Mode turned on. After coming home each day it will connect to some mesh nodes, but not roam to others. Toggling off/on Wi-Fi 6E mode or Wi-Fi altogether will fix the problem until the next day I return home. The problem occurred with my iPhone 16 PM too and eventually cleared up after some iOS and/or Netgear updates. Now the problem has reemerged with the iPhone 17 PM.