Only IoS devices dropping internet

[JD4]

Hello - any advice gratefully received.

Only the IoS devices in our household (iPhone iPad) are dropping internet. They remain connected to WiFi ok but have been dropping in and out of internet connectivity all day.

A desktop PC and an Apple TV remain connected OK even when the iPhone/iPad drops.

Full dial tone on phone.

Drops are intermittent but when devices drop they stayed dropped for about 10 mins.

Have rebooted hub, have turned devices off and on again, have used "forget this network" on the devices.

[countrypaul]

How are the PC and TV connected, by Ethernet or WiFi?

What router are you using?

Are the MAC addresses on you iPad & iPhone fixed?

[Keith_Beddoe]

@JD4 

Try a factory reset of the home hub,

https://www.bt.com/help/broadband/how-do-i-reset-my-bt-hub-to-its-factory-settings

Its possible that the home hub has run out of internal connections, a common issue if you have devices that are using random MAC addresses. You can probably see lots of "unknown device" entries in the home hub connections list.

A factory reset clears this list, but eventually it will happen again.

[JD4]

PC and TV by Wifi. 

Router is BT SMART Hub

I don;t know about MAC addresses. Is there a setting on the phone ?

[JD4]

Thanks I will try a factory reset when the rugby has finished 😉

[Keith_Beddoe · Accepted solution]

I don't know about MAC addresses. Is there a setting on the phone ?

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT211227

Its best to turn it off on all Apple devices for your own home wireless network because each new MAC address results in the home hub allocation a new IP address, so eventually it runs out of allocations and devices cannot get a new IP address and lose connection.

A factory reset of the home hub removes all the allocations.

If you have BT Digital voice, make sure you make a backup of the stored phone numbers as they will be deleted.  I believe there is an option to export the numbers and import them afterwards.

[JD4]

Thanks for your help. Reset of router has flushed out the issue.

As an interim solution we found that connecting to generic BT-WIFI network got the IoS devices connected.

[Keith_Beddoe]

BT-Wifi uses a different DHCP scope on a different IP subnet, however it not without its own problems, and eventually suffers from similar issues with users not being able to get an IP address from the hotspot although this is normally cleared by a soft reset as connection information is not retained in non-volatile memory.

[TimCurtis]

@JD4 

Couple of things to do with all Apple devices is to turn off Private Addressing for your home network (as Keith has identified) and within the router assign fixed IP addresses for those (and all other home devices).

It seems that Apple devices will disconnect & reconnect to the wifi very frequently for a reason that I've not quite been able to determine.