How to Get Your iPhone 3GS to Connect to WiFi
I’ve been using the iPhone 3GS for about 8 months now and one big frustration was getting it to connect to my home WiFi network.
I use an IO Data Airport wireless G unit which I love since it is tiny and didn’t cost much. This works well with my computers but the iPhone struggles to connect.
Searching on the web, I found a huge thread on the iPhone support forums and none of the posts helped me to solve my problem so I won’t link to it from here.
What I recently discovered was that the iPhone may lock up in the settings screen or it’s resources are used up by background apps that are still running. This seems to be what is stopping it connecting to the WiFi network, nothing at all to do with the modem or signal strength.
So here are some techniques that I discovered helps me connect my iPhone to my Wifi network:
Remove ALL the background apps from the memory.
Double click on the big round button at the base of the phone. This displays a list of the running apps. Then, hold your finger on any icon of an app. This then displays the icons shaking with minus signs next to them. Then you can click on icons to remove them from the memory. So after this exercise, your iPhone memory may be freed up enough to enable your iPhone to connect to your WiFi.
So you may now go to Settings -> Wi-Fi Choose a network and connect to your network by entering the password.
However, this still may not work even if your network name is displayed.
So now hold down the top on/off button of the iPhone for a few seconds until you are prompted with a slider to power off the iPhone. So do this until the phone is powered off.
Then reboot the iPhone by pressing down and holding this button again until you see the Apple icon. Then the phone will reboot and you can try to connect again.
Please share your tips for How to Get Your iPhone 3GS to Connect to WiFi in the comments …
Some more ideas:
I changed the channel of my Wireless G router to move it as far away from my Microwave Oven frequency as was possible, to try and minimize the interference on my WiFi Network from the oven. So it’s possible that I picked a channel that doesn’t work well with the iPhone.
Signal strength is up and down like a yoyo so this could well be the problem.
Also, a friend suggested restoring the iTunes and the Phone to factory default settings and re-installing only the apps and data that I use. Since some apps may be the cause of the problems.