These hotspot networks show up under “My Networks” on iOS 16.4 FWIW.
They can say what they want about “being given the lowest priority”, but but they clearly are competing with my home network and winning some fraction of the time.
I suspect this has to do with beaconing and once you force it to join your wifi it will stop until you leave your wifi coverage.
If you are walking towards your house and it sees one of these 'sponsored networks' it will autojoin it, when you walk into your house it won't switch. It saw the 'sponsored networks' beacon first.
>I suspect this has to do with beaconing and once you force it to join your wifi it will stop until you leave your wifi coverage.
Great point. Wouldn't that mean it "beacons" to your neighbor when you drive home? Then stays connected as you go inside?
Wifi is tricky, if a momentary loss of your main SSID results in your device hopping to the next-available SSID your phone is basically always at risk of jumping LANs
Which is fine for a house, but imagine a (wifi) crowded condo/apartment. You could be in bed but opposite your neighbors closet so physically closer to their WiFi thus “louder”.
People buy the cheapest shit cable modem/router they can buy and use it until it physically dies or rent a very basic unit for a large space. Because they are unwilling to buy or rent sufficient hardware there is going to be spaces in the house where a temporary drop or dip that is going to turn into a roam on an adjacent network.
Fortunately my carrier doesn’t do this, but having to manually select my own Wi-Fi every time I come home (so that I can reach local devices) sounds extremely annoying.
I‘d hope that the iPhone would at least periodically rescan for higher priority networks.
Yeah, that doesn't match their spec. Unless your home network goes down momentarily and the iPhone immediately switches to the other wi-fi network. You could maybe check the iPhone logs (or the router logs!) to see if this happens, but this is going to be a pain to figure out what is happening and when.
They can say what they want about “being given the lowest priority”, but but they clearly are competing with my home network and winning some fraction of the time.