Router dropping iPhone clients

[fields987]

For the last several months, I've been dealing with sporadic issues with iphone clients. Doesn't happen every day, but both my wife and I will sometimes have to disconnect and reconnect from wifi first thing in the morning. On the iphone side, the wifi status indicator shows as connected with good signal strength. On the router side, the client does not appear in the client list or the wireless log.

I find these kinds of entries in the system log after I had gone to sleep
May 2 01:22:24 WLCEVENTD: Deauth_ind xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
May 2 01:22:24 hostapd: eth7: STA xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx IEEE 802.11: disassociated

I've observed this behavior on both an RT-AC68U running stock and merlin firmware and an RT-AX88U running merlin (384.14 - 384.17). I've gone trough the factory reset procedure. We're using an iphone 8+ and iphone 11 currently on ios 13.4.1, but has been happening at least on ios 12.x. I haven't observed this behavior on any other iot or client devices.

Thanks for any help

 

[K-2SO]

Take a look here - http://www.iphonehacks.com/2019/09/fix-ios-13-wifi-not-working-slow-dropping-out-issues.html

 

[fields987]

Take a look here - http://www.iphonehacks.com/2019/09/fix-ios-13-wifi-not-working-slow-dropping-out-issues.html

Thanks, K-2SO. I’ve been through these before. I’m thinking my next step is disabling wmm apsd as I’m reading iPhones don’t always play nice with that feature.

 

[K-2SO]

Other things may cause connection issues
- Protected Management Frames
- Airtime Fairness
- Universal Beamforming
- DFS channels
With no WMM APSD your mobile devices will drain batteries faster

 

[fields987]

Other things may cause connection issues
- Protected Management Frames
- Airtime Fairness
- Universal Beamforming
- DFS channels
With no WMM APSD your mobile devices will drain batteries faster

Yeah, that’s why I’ve been hesitant to disable it. I’ll disable pmf and give that a try. I’m not using dfs channels and have universal beamforming disabled.

 

[bluzfanmr1]

Yeah, that’s why I’ve been hesitant to disable it. I’ll disable pmf and give that a try. I’m not using dfs channels and have universal beamforming disabled.

It won't hurt to try disabling WMM APSD and that's what I do. From my understanding, you want the devices to decide when to save power and not the router. Having this enabled can confuse the devices.

 

[Squall Leonhart]

It won't hurt to try disabling WMM APSD and that's what I do. From my understanding, you want the devices to decide when to save power and not the router. Having this enabled can confuse the devices.

without it enabled the devices won't decide at all.

 

[bluzfanmr1]

without it enabled the devices won't decide at all.

Care to elaborate? It's well documented that WMM APSD interferes with iphones. If you watch your wireless log, you can see when the phone goes into power saving mode.

 

[K-2SO]

It's well documented that WMM APSD interferes with iphones.

I have 4 iPhones and 2 iPads on my network. No issues with WMM APSD enabled.