We’ve All Experienced It…
Step out of the house and your music or podcast goes silent for several seconds before it picks up again. That gap is the iPhone moving from Wi-Fi to 4G/5G cellular data – it hangs on to the fading Wi-Fi network far too long, then lets go of it before cellular data is ready to take over. Speedify is an app that keeps Wi-Fi and 4G/5G cellular data both in use at once, so nothing has to be let go of and nothing goes silent. We measured what an iPhone really does as its Wi-Fi goes bad, and the results show how much smoother that moment is with Speedify running.
Speedify keeps your devices online when Wi-Fi drops.
Wi-Fi cuts out for all kinds of reasons: a weak signal, a tired router, a phone clinging to the wrong access point. Speedify bonds your Wi-Fi with any second connection, often 4G/5G cellular, and switches the moment one drops. Nothing has to reconnect.
Here’s the Ping
Let’s explore using the free Ping Lite application on an iPhone. Here we ping the address 8.8.8.8, which is a special “Anycast” address and takes you to the closest Google DNS server. Since Google has servers all over the world, this is an easy way to test your connection’s latency no matter where you are.
In order to get a baseline for what things look like when you have a good connection, I went and stood next to our Wi-Fi router with the iPhone in-hand. The Speedify office router is connected to a Comcast Xfinity 75 Mbps Business Internet connection. While running, Ping Lite is sending one message each second, and timing how long it takes to get a response.
This is what I see:
Every packet that gets sent is received, and response times are in the 30-40 ms range (that’s pretty good).
Now we know what a decent Wi-Fi connection looks like on the iPhone. To see what happens when smartphones move out of Wi-Fi range, I simply started walking away from the router and out of our office (while Ping Lite continued to fire off packets).
The Not-So-Pretty Results
Taking a look at the results above, we can see exactly how the iPhone fails to keep us online when switching from Wi-Fi to 4G:
- Take a look at the first couple pings. Wi-Fi is taking longer and longer to respond, showing times like 62 ms and 40 ms. That may not sound so terrible, but then I take one more step, and…
- For 5 messages in a row, none of the pings on Wi-Fi get any response. That’s 5 full seconds without Internet. What’s worse is that many of my apps will not automatically revive themselves, so Internet radio drops off, my Meerkat viewers see the video stream completely disappear, YouTube goes to buffering until I restart the video… you get the idea, I’m off the Internet.
- Finally, the phone gives up on Wi-Fi and switches to mobile broadband. 4G LTE has much higher latencies than Wi-Fi, but at least I’m back online. But, here’s the rub: I still have to manually restart streaming apps, uploads, and downloads to get them to recognize and work over the 4G connection.
When you hit the end of your home or office Wi-Fi, your phone takes 5 or more seconds to realize what’s happened, before giving up. For anyone trying to stream to-or-from their iPhone and Android devices, manage app updates or other downloads/uploads, this is enough to break everything and leave you having to reinitiate apps manually. I think you’ll agree, this is not how your smartphone should work.
Speedify
Get started with Speedify today.
Combine Wi-Fi, 4G/5G cellular, Ethernet, Starlink, and more into one faster, steadier connection. Free to try — no credit card required.
🚀 Speed
Faster uploads and downloads by bonding all your connections at once.
📶 Stability
Automatic failover in under a second when any connection drops.
🔒 Security
AES-256 encryption on every connection, on every network you join.
15M+ downloads worldwide. 75K+ five-star reviews on iOS and Android.