IOS 9.0.1 Wi-Fi Assist - You may want to turn it off

[radem]

http://www.neowin.net/news/psa-turn-off-this-ios-9-setting-if-you-dont-have-an-unlimited-data-plan

 

My daughter came to me yesterday asking why she was using a huge amount of LTE data since her phone was upgraded to IOS 9.0.1.  She is on a capped data plan and was concerned that she burned through 10% of her data plan in 2 days.  I checked around her phone and found a new setting under Settings - Cellular that is hidden all the way at the bottom called Wi-Fi Assist.  This setting is new in IOS 9.0.1 and defaults to on.

 

The description of Wi-Fi Assist is that it automatically switches you from Wi-Fi to cellular when your Wi-Fi connectivity is poor.  How this appears to work is if your Wi-Fi strength indicator gets low, it automatically switches to the cellular radio for your data.  This means that in places where you used to use Wi-Fi, your phone will now be using your cellular data.  This is certainly not something she wanted as she would have run out of her monthly data plan in 20 days.

 

My suggestion is to turn that setting off as soon as you can.

[Tengen31]

I saw something about this on the news. They said the same thing. However wifi Assist was on my sisters iphone and, she had not updated it to IOS 9.0.1 yet.

[Oscar091466]

WI-FI assist is meant to help in cases you still have wifi signal but it's to weak to actually send and receive any data. Problem is that the way it works you'll get switched over to cellular before you actually have unusable WI-FI connectivity. Its a good concept, just need to be tweaked some. This is something the Apple needs to work on with future updates.

[anthony.spina97]

Wi-Fi assist came in iOS 9.0. It is not new to 9.0.1. I believe it is a useful feature, but a feature that should be turned off by default.

 

-Anthony

[EvanA]

Android L does this by default with no option to disable it. The difference is on Android its indicated by an exclamation point over the WiFi icon and showing the mobile data indicator.

[gusherb]

I haven't had any experience with wifi assist, so I took my phone to the farthest corner of the basement completely opposite the router (that's up two floors on the opposite corner) and found it to drop wifi when I was still able to get 10 Mbps down or so. I wasn't too pleased that it was doing that while the connection was still usable so I ended up shutting it off.