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Use Wi-Fi Assistant in iOS. It will also help with switching between multiple Wi-Fi networks

Ondrej Holzman
18

The Wi-Fi Assistant feature is nothing new in iOS. She appeared in it almost two years ago, but we decided to remind her one more time. On the one hand, it is so hidden in the settings that many users forget about it, and above all, it proved to be a great helper for us.

Deep within the iOS settings can be found some very useful features that are easy to overlook. Wi-Fi Assistant is definitely one of them. You can find it in Settings > Mobile data, where you have to scroll through all apps all the way to the bottom.

Once you've activated Wi-Fi Assistant, you'll be automatically disconnected from that network when the Wi-Fi signal is weak, and your iPhone or iPad will switch to cellular data. How the function works, we already described in detail. At the time, many users were wondering whether the automatic disconnection from weak Wi-Fi would drain them of too much data - that's why Apple added a counter in iOS 9.3, which will show you how much mobile data you've used thanks to/because of Wi-Fi Assistant.

assistant-wifi-data

If you have a really limited data plan, then it's worth keeping an eye on this data. Directly in Settings > Mobile data > Wi-Fi assistant, you can find how much mobile data the function has already consumed. And you can always reset this statistic to have an overview of how often and in what volume mobile data is preferred over Wi-Fi1.

However, if you have a data plan higher than a few hundred megabytes, then we definitely recommend that you activate the Wi-Fi Assistant. When using an iPhone continuously, there is nothing more annoying than when, for example, you leave the office, you still have the company Wi-Fi network on one line, but practically nothing is loaded over it, or only very slowly.

Wi-Fi Assistant takes care of pulling out the Control Center and turning Wi-Fi off (and possibly back on again) so that you can comfortably surf the Internet over mobile data again. But perhaps the Wi-Fi Assistant has proven to be even more useful if, for example, you have multiple wireless networks in the office or at home.

When you get home, iPhone automatically connects to the first (usually stronger) Wi-Fi network it detects. But it can no longer respond on its own when you are closer to a much stronger signal and continues to stick to the original network even when the reception is weak. You have to either automatically switch to the second Wi-Fi or at least turn Wi-Fi on/off in iOS. Wi-Fi Assistant intelligently takes care of this process for you.

When it evaluates that the signal of the first Wi-Fi network it connects to after you arrive home is already too weak, it will switch to mobile data, and since you are probably already in range of another wireless network, it will automatically switch to it after a while. This process will cost you a few kilobytes or megabytes of transferred mobile data, but the convenience that Wi-Fi Assistant will bring you will greatly improve the user experience.

  1. Considering that the Wi-Fi Assistant should really only consume the most necessary amount of data and should not even disconnect from Wi-Fi during large data transfers (streaming video, downloading large attachments, etc.), according to Apple, the consumption of mobile data should not increase more than a few percent. ↩︎
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