To those noticing intermittent, erratic and slow wifi

[Megalobyte]

I think there are 2 things going on.

First, my 4s seems to be a bit faster on wifi than my 5. I saw a few other threads that indicate others have seen this too. If anybody has done some good head to head wifi speed tests between a 4s and a 5 on the same wifi connection, I'd love to know which phone was consistently faster.

But, I also think there's an iOS 6 wifi glitch at work as well. Here's why.

I have opened a bunch of large photos on web pages with both phones, the 4s tends to render the pics a bit faster, surprising, but, the really strange thing is, many times, if I switch wifi off and use the phone's relatively slow AT&T hspa connection instead of wifi, it'll actually load the pics faster than when I use wifi. Even though my wifi clocks anywhere from 20-30 Mbps, and the hspa/4g is typically only 5-6. It sure seems as if something in iOS 6 is screwing up wifi. And either the 5 is more affected by it, or, both are affected, but for some reason, the 5's wifi is actually a bit slower and weaker than the 4s.


Up until I upgraded to iOS 6, and got the 5, my 4s at home, on wifi was like lightning. Now, it seems a bit slower, and, the 5 is even slower than the 4s on wifi.

The 5 is however faster than the 4s was on hspa cellular.

I hope this is something fixable in a patch. I do 95% of my phone Internet browsing at home on wifi, and right now, despite the 5 getting at least respectable speedtests of around 15-20 Mbps, overall, it's nowhere near as fast on wifi as my 4s was before ios6.

So 2 strange things here. One, that my 4s is consistently faster by 7-8 Mbps than my 5 on wifi in the same exact spot. And second, pages will load faster connected to a 5-7 Mbps hspa connection than a 20 Mbps wifi connection. Makes very little sense.

 

[KenAFSPC]

I think there are 2 things going on.

First, my 4s seems to be a bit faster on wifi than my 5. I saw a few other threads that indicate others have seen this too. If anybody has done some good head to head wifi speed tests between a 4s and a 5 on the same wifi connection, I'd love to know which phone was consistently faster.

But, I also think there's an iOS 6 wifi glitch at work as well. Here's why.

I have opened a bunch of large photos on web pages with both phones, the 4s tends to render the pics a bit faster, surprising, but, the really strange thing is, many times, if I switch wifi off and use the phone's relatively slow AT&T hspa connection instead of wifi, it'll actually load the pics faster than when I use wifi. Even though my wifi clocks anywhere from 20-30 Mbps, and the hspa/4g is typically only 5-6. It sure seems as if something in iOS 6 is screwing up wifi. And either the 5 is more affected by it, or, both are affected, but for some reason, the 5's wifi is actually a bit slower and weaker than the 4s.


Up until I upgraded to iOS 6, and got the 5, my 4s at home, on wifi was like lightning. Now, it seems a bit slower, and, the 5 is even slower than the 4s on wifi.

The 5 is however faster than the 4s was on hspa cellular.

I hope this is something fixable in a patch. I do 95% of my phone Internet browsing at home on wifi, and right now, despite the 5 getting at least respectable speedtests of around 15-20 Mbps, overall, it's nowhere near as fast on wifi as my 4s was before ios6.

So 2 strange things here. One, that my 4s is consistently faster by 7-8 Mbps than my 5 on wifi in the same exact spot. And second, pages will load faster connected to a 5-7 Mbps hspa connection than a 20 Mbps wifi connection. Makes very little sense.

There are several threads on this topic. Here is what I posted yesterday:

Here is LTE on AT&T:

Here is HSPA+ (i.e., LTE disabled) on AT&T, which is about 3x what I got on the 4S.

My Wifi (802.11n) result is below.

I am not at all happy with the 802.11n performance (my iPad3 gets near 60Mbps and my 4S gets >30Mbps), and I plan to replace my router today to see if it makes a difference. My wired throughput is about 80Mbps on FiOS.

This morning, I was seeing sporadic results (10-24Mbps) with the iPhone5 for the default Speedtest.net location. That might not seem bad, but this is FiOS service where I normally get 81-83Mbps on Speedtest.net with a wired network connection and 30-40Mbps via wireless on my iPhone4S. These results are with the Verizon-provided Actiontec MI-424WR (Rev.I) 2.4GHz 802.11n router.

This afternoon, I found that I could get more consistent results in the 25-30Mbps range with the iPhone 5 when using the NY Speedtest.net location rather than the default location.

This evening, I swapped out my Verizon-provided router with the widely recommended Asus RT-N66U wireless router. This router provides separate 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless networks for different devices. Here's my iPhone5 Speedtest.net result to the NY Speedtest.net server using the new router.

Despite these fantastic results, I still see occasional pauses when browsing/downloading via Wifi on the iPhone 5,which I haven't noticed on the 4s or the ipad3. It's as if the 5 is periodically losing its Wifi connection for a fraction of a second.