The iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro series feature WiFi 6 support, meaning they can offer blazing fast download speeds. However, that does not mean you will not run into WiFi connectivity issues on your new iPhone. If you face slow or spotty WiFi coverage on your iPhone 13 or iPhone 13 Pro, check out the guide below.
Some of the most common WiFi issues that iPhone 13 or iPhone 13 Pro owners could face include slow WiFi speeds, constantly sticking to 2.4 GHz rather than 5GHz, getting an incorrect password prompt, WiFi settings grayed out, dropping connection intermittently, or speeds being extremely slow. If you face any such issues on your iPhone 13 or iPhone 13 Pro, follow the troubleshooting steps below.
1. Restart Your WiFi Router
Before blaming your iPhone 13 or iOS 15.4 for WiFi issues, you should check your WiFi router. First, restart your WiFi router and connect your iPhone to the network again to see if that helps the issue. The router is like a mini-computer with a CPU, memory, and local storage in the plastic box, running in an operating system. So like a computer, restarting your router can resolve the problem.
It is also recommended to wait for 10 seconds after you have turned off your router before restarting it to ensure that every capacitor is fully drained, and thus every bit of memory is cleared. This ensures that all the settings on the router that may be causing the issue are reset.
If your ISP has also supplied a modem with the WiFi router, make sure to restart it as well.
2. Update Your Router’s Firmware
Update your router’s firmware to ensure that the known bugs have been fixed. In some cases, this could be the reason why your iPhone running iOS 15.4 is not able to connect to the WiFi network. You should ideally regularly update your WiFi router’s firmware as it can improve its performance or fix bugs and security issues.
3. Force Reboot
Like all tech problems, there is no harm in starting off by hard rebooting or force rebooting your iPhone 13 or iPhone 13 Pro to see it helps. On the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro, press the Volume Up button, then the Volume Down button, and then quickly press and hold the Side button until you see the Apple logo show up. You can check our guide to hard reboot iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro if you need further help.
4. Forget WiFi Network and Rejoin
If you’re unable to connect to a WiFi network and are prompted that the password you’ve entered is incorrect despite entering the correct password, try to forget the WiFi network and join it again.
To forget the WiFi network, tap on the WiFi network on your iPhone 13 mini, iPhone 13, iPhone 13 Pro, or iPhone 13 Pro Max from the list under Settings > WiFi. Then tap Forget This Network. You’ll be prompted with a popup message asking you if you want to forget the WiFi Network. Tap Forget to forget the network.
Now go back to Settings > WiFi, select the network again, enter the password, and Join the network again to see if it helps.
5. Reset Network Settings
Most networking-related issues I’ve experienced have been fixed after resetting network settings. Resetting these settings flushes caches and clears DHCP settings and other networking-related info. To reset network settings, open the Settings app and navigate to Settings > General > Reset and tap on Reset Network Settings.
6. Disable VPN
If you are using a VPN on your iPhone, disable it to see if that helps resolve WiFi issues on your iPhone.
You can disable VPN via the Settings app. Alternatively, you can use the VPN app on your iPhone to disable it to see if it resolves the WiFi problem on your iPhone 13.
7. Disable WiFi Networking Services
Many users have reported that they’ve solved their issues by disabling WiFi Networking under Settings > Privacy > Location Services > System Services. This only relates to your location being used for WiFi Networking, so it doesn’t disable WiFi entirely.
8. Change DNS Server
If you’re getting slow WiFi speeds on your iPhone 13 or iPhone 13 Pro, it could due to your ISPs DNS servers. You can switch to Google DNS, CloudFlare, or OpenDNS to see if it improves the WiFi speed. You can follow the instructions in our post to change the DNS server on your iPhone.
9. Ask To Join Network
This is not an ideal solution, but if none of the solutions mentioned above work, then you can try enabling Ask to Join Networks by going to Settings > WiFi.
10. WiFi Assist
iOS includes a WiFi Assist feature, which provides more reliable Internet connections when your WiFi network becomes spotty. This feature could do more harm than good in many cases and cause WiFi issues on your iPhone.
To turn off WiFi Assist, launch the Settings app and navigate to Settings > Cellular (Mobile in some regions) and scroll down to the bottom where you will see WiFi Assist. Tap on the toggle to turn it off.
11. Disable iCloud Private Relay
Private Address is an iOS privacy feature that prevents your iPhone from being tracked across different WiFi networks by using a random MAC address every time. However, this could potentially cause connectivity issues with some public WiFi networks. While not recommended, you can disable Private Address from Settings > Wi-Fi > [Wi-Fi name].
Similarly, if your iPhone 13 connects to a WiFi network but the internet is working too slow, disable the new iCloud Relay feature in iOS 15 to see if that solves the connectivity issues.
12. Wait for an iOS 15.4 Update
If your iPhone started exhibiting WiFi issues after the iOS 15.4 update, it could be a sign of an underlying iOS bug. In such cases, you can wait for a few days or weeks until Apple releases a new iOS 15.4 update that hopefully fixes the issue for good.
13. Restore and Setup as new iPhone
If none of these tips fix your issues, the last resort is to restore your iPhone or iPad via iTunes and set it up as a new device. This way, you start afresh and get rid of possibly problematic customizations and settings on your device.
Follow the instructions in the post linked below to do a clean restore to the latest version of iOS via iTunes.
➤ How to restore your iPhone or iPad with iTunes
14. Visit an Apple Store
Even after performing all these steps, you’re still having problems, then you might want to visit your nearest Apple Store to know of any possible hardware-related issues.
Have you faced any WiFi issues on your iPhone 13 or iPhone 13 Pro? If so, did the above tips help in solving the problem for you? Drop a comment and let us know!
