IOS 14 WiFi

It has been several days since I have had any wireless issues.

First, yes IOS 14 now includes a private WiFi MAC address feature. So if you are filtering by MAC, resolve that issue first. Then if you are like many others still having issues, read the rest of my post.

Turning the WiFi off and on, was the original symptom.

WPA Key Regeneration timing interval was entirely the cause of the WiFi issues.

It also appears some new wireless routers have this feature disabled / not checked / zero or max by default now.

Since basically disabling the above feature on my WiFi router, I have had no more issues and it cost me nothing to login to the WiFi router and turn the feature off.

I am sure some big company could just sell you another new wireless router that fixes all these problems simply by turning off the same common feature by default to be more compatible with all the iPhones and iPads. $$$

For those of you who tried switching back to WEP security, the reason it worked, WEP security keys were static and there was no random number generator that rotates the security keys.

WPA2 now negotiates the pre shared key and then generates another random secret key to continue talking. The first negotiation seems to work just fine. After that, the group key regeneration timing value set by the wireless router starts to cycle and rotates the keys and that is when you will notice problems with your IOS 14 devices.

Disable the group key regeneration interval and the problem goes away.

Now on to the bigger question, why has this not been addressed in the IOS 14 WiFi drivers? Is it a compatibility issue with older wifi routers or do Apple products not support this feature? (Group Key Interval)

Does anyone know what the default value is on the new Apple Airport Express / Extreme wireless base stations?

The problem is that sometimes the wifi can't be "toggled". Even with the aformentioned solution, my iphone wont always find the wifi and then I have to reboot it. So no that's not the entire solution to the problem.

It has been a week and no issues after disabling WPA Key Regeneration timing interval This was entirely the cause of the WiFi issues.

If you are having problems with your iphone finding your Wifi, that is a totally different issue. You either have a bad wifi router, or the other most common problem, wifi frequency conflict. Relocate your router to the center of your home so that you have better signal strength throughout your home. Otherwise if you and your neighbor have the wifi routers on the same side of the house and they are on conflicting frequency channel, they will both be competing and the phone can’t distinguish them apart. Think of it like this, frequencies are either different or the same. If they are the same, they take turns sharing, if you neighbor is on the same frequency, and your wifi access points are to close, the sharing part is more difficult to do because of the signal strength being to strong and to close. Move them further apart. It does wonders.

More research information about having to turn WiFi off and On.

I am having no more issues after disabling the WiFi Group Key Interval on my Router.

However, others are now providing additional information from their wireless router debug logs to indicate their apple devices are generating error logs in their WiFi Router at the configured Interval.

The recorded error is this:

WPA: received EAPOL-Key with invalid MIC

This is an error from the wireless router that is generated by the client (apple device).

It appears that turning off the Group Key Interval is a work around to prevent clients from trying to rekey the encryption which avoids these types of errors with apple devices.

To prove this issue with IOS 14, I conducted another experiment.

My WiFi Router supports 4 virtual access points.

I disabled the Group Key Interval on one of the four virtual access points.

I reduced the Group Key Interval on the other three virtual access points to either 10 or 15 minutes.

IOS 14 connected to the same WiFi router on virtual access point one with disabled group key interval never has any more WiFi issues.

The IOS 14 devices connected to the same exact WiFi router on any of the virtual access points with a reduced group key interval have the WiFi problem way more often.

The WiFi problems with the IOS 14 devices on any access point with Group Key Interval enabled continue to have problems while IOS 14 devices on virtual access points with Group Key Interval disabled work exactly as expected.

When Group Key Interval disabled, set to zero, or Max Time, the IOS 14 devices never have any more WiFi Issues.

This experiment was done on the same wireless router using 4 different virtual access points to prove a point.

During these research experiments, none of the other wireless devices, laptops, computers, etc, had any WiFi issues regardless of changing these settings to on or off, high or low. It only affected apple IOS 14 devices.

My ios 14 problem doesnt revolve around only toggling wifi on and off. Sometimes the wifi cannot be toggled as I said. It is completely grayed out and cannot be selected. Then I have to restart my phone numerous times and if I am lucky the wifi will be fine for a while. Now this doesnt happen with an old iphone that I have which still carries an ios 12 or sth. I have already tried everything including your solution and it simply didnt work. So there is more to that. I expect from more people here to try it out and tell us what they discovered.

When I tried to set Key Regeneration timing interval in my Asus router to 0, both iPhone and iPad seem to work fine. But both Samsung TV can't connect to WiFi anymore, or connect but can't access Internet. Now I have to set the interval back to 3600, and apple WiFi problems come back.

Since updating my iphone and ipad to ios 14.6, both have had intermittent internet connectivity issues. Both will say they are connected to the wifi, but I can’t access the internet. It disconnects in the middle of streaming. It is NOT an issue with my home wifi. My husband’s phone (not an iPhone) is just fine. All other electronics in our home are connecting just fine to the wifi with full internet access. Essentially to use my iphone or ipad, I have to turn off wifi. What is the fix? My battery has also been draining, but I don’t know if that is because I am using my devices without wifi, or if another glitch with the Apple update. Apple - You need to fix this. Unacceptable! Does anyone know a fix? I have rebooted both devices. I have deleted the wifi from the device, rebooted, then reconnected the wifi. Nothing has worked. I have seen suggestions to reboot my home wifi. Not an acceptable resolution. Then every device in my home (there are many) would have to be reconnected.

Also having the same problem iOS 14.6 killed wifi with my asus RT-5300 and iPad 8th generation. I have never had problems on iOS 13 with WiFi. All these problems started with IOS 14. I had to return an iPad Pro because of the same problem.

Since yesterday morning, I have issues with WIFI on my iPhone 11 with iOS 14.6

I can connect to the Wifi but I don't get the wifi icon at the top of the display and most applications claim "No internet Access". Despite this, some things load correctly, probably via 4G. So text works fine for example in messenger, but not pictures. I have rebooted the phone, I have done a couple of HW resets and I have done a reset of the network settings. No change. I have tried two different wifi networks, so it is not router related (different types of routers). Other equipment including my Macbook and my iPad as well as the rest of the family has no issues, only my iPhone 11. As there is no shell available in iOS, it's hard to find out what is really going on. Any suggestions, or do I need to backup to my computer and make a factory reset and if that doesn't help, take it in for repair ??

Thanks

To add a bit more - Apple CarPlay have also stopped working. One last resort before going to the repair shop was to erase the phone and then install an older backup from the computer. Turned out to be a bit hard, as it tries to connect to apple to remove it from my account, and as the network isn't working, the erase procedure fails with "Verification failed".

Disable Group Key Interval.

Your router model looks like this example where it is enabled by default in the Asus Routers.

https://demoui.asus.com/Advanced_Wireless_Content.asp

1 year has passed. iOS 15 is out, and the issue still hasn’t been resolved. I’ve totally lost faith in apple. The suggestion about key interval doesn’t apply to me because my router doesn’t even have that setting option.

After a recent update I could not use my iPad with WiFi. Long story short my simple fix was to turn off my vpn

This specific issue is not related to having a VPN, many of those who have commented mentioned they are not using a VPN. Waiting to see if ios 15.1 will resolve the issue as the patch contains a bug fix for “ipad not finding available wifi networks.”

I have been trying to solve this issue for awhile myself now, which recently became a major headache, as I lost all internet connectivity through wifi as many have explained above. iPhone 12pro running 15.1 shows connected to network, but also says no internet connection. Other devices connected are working fine, but phone is intermittent (very generous description). It also appears my 5G is being impacted when I disable wifi ( most of last week). I have worked with Apple support online and in store for 20+ hours as well as Xfinity in an effort to try and isolate the problem and come up with a solution ( I had not seen this thread unfortunately and was working as though I was the first person dealing with an isolated problem). I was told by tech in Apple store that there was a known bug involving data corruption that caused the issue, so we rebuilt my backup and wiped the phone and started fresh. It didn't work. I have also done a factory refresh clean install and leave all apps and data off the phone, but it still didn't work. I then replaced the phone and restored to backup done shortly before I wiped the phone and it worked for several hours and then failed again. Clearly this is a known issue that has been going on for at least a year now and based on the number of folks following this (ones that happened upon it like me - at least 57k ) it is not an isolated event impacting a few folks. This is something Apple need to address! I have a lot of hours invested in this and the impact this is having on me is real. If it cannot be fixed, let us know so we can adapt/change phones, platforms, software ... I am curious if anyone using the new 13pro is having this issue??