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I just want phones to be hyper-aggressive about terminating WiFi connections if the signal strength falls below a certain point. I've gotten to the point where

by amyjess 10y ago

I just want phones to be hyper-aggressive about terminating WiFi connections if the signal strength falls below a certain point. I've gotten to the point where I'll manually turn off WiFi as soon as I set foot outside my front door. It should be automatic.

sotojuan 10y ago
I turn it off when I get into my elevator because if not it'll be in a 1x limbo state for about five minutes, even once I am completely out of the building.
kibwen 10y ago
As someone who works in a building with four underground stories, this cuts both ways: there are plenty of times when I've had seemingly zero bars and full wifi yet no ability to conjure network access until I manually disable cellular data. Why it's trying to prioritize cell over wifi in the first place, god only knows.
- SimbaOnSteroids 10y ago
  I'd imagine it could have something to do with the incentive to take up as much cellular data as possible, the same reason many providers don't let your phone access the built in antenna.
closeparen 10y ago
Phone apps in general have a huge problem with extremely high timeouts and no user-facing cancel/retry buttons. My intuition for whether a request that's not done yet is ever going to complete seems to be much better than what's written into most apps. It's really annoying when I have to entirely kill and reopen the app, rather than just have that one operation retried.
- chetanahuja 10y ago
  The answer to that of course is that the underlying network protocols need to be aware of this dilemma. It's wasteful for every developer to try and solve this problem on their own. The main culprit here is of course TCP's session based view of the world which was invented for a completely different era. An era when "cable got cut" was a catastrophic event that was almost never going to happen. It's a pity that the native app world is still mostly stuck with TCP/HTTP based networking stack where a UDP/mobile-specific-protocol is what's needed.
celticninja 10y ago
Get llama
jessriedel 10y ago
This exists on Android. If you enable the "developer settings" https://www.howtogeek.com/129728/how-to-access-the-developer-options-menu-and-enable-usb-debugging-on-android-4.2/ https://www.howtogeek.com/129728/how-to-access-the-developer... you then have the option to enable "Aggressive Wi-Fi to Cellular handover" > It just artificially reduces the WiFi RSSI (received signal strength indication) to encourage the WiFi state machine to decide to switch the connection from WiFi to cellular network. https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/90250/what-does-the-aggressive-wi-fi-to-cellular-handover-option-in-developer-settin https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/90250/what-does-... Anecdotally, I have had fewer headaches with the phone holding on to poor wifi-signals since I enabled this. Ideally the phone would handle this in a smarter way, e.g., by monitoring the strength of both the wifi and data signals and switching to whichever is likely to have the least packet loss.
- chetanahuja 10y ago
  > Ideally the phone would handle this in a smarter way, e.g., by monitoring the strength of both the wifi and data signals and switching to whichever is likely to have the least packet loss The tradeoff here of course is battery life. The phone OS doesn't want to switch on a second radio until absolutely necessary for obvious reasons.

by amyjess 10y ago

sotojuan 10y ago

I turn it off when I get into my elevator because if not it'll be in a 1x limbo state for about five minutes, even once I am completely out of the building.

kibwen 10y ago

As someone who works in a building with four underground stories, this cuts both ways: there are plenty of times when I've had seemingly zero bars and full wifi yet no ability to conjure network access until I manually disable cellular data. Why it's trying to prioritize cell over wifi in the first place, god only knows.

SimbaOnSteroids 10y ago
I'd imagine it could have something to do with the incentive to take up as much cellular data as possible, the same reason many providers don't let your phone access the built in antenna.

closeparen 10y ago

Phone apps in general have a huge problem with extremely high timeouts and no user-facing cancel/retry buttons. My intuition for whether a request that's not done yet is ever going to complete seems to be much better than what's written into most apps. It's really annoying when I have to entirely kill and reopen the app, rather than just have that one operation retried.

chetanahuja 10y ago
The answer to that of course is that the underlying network protocols need to be aware of this dilemma. It's wasteful for every developer to try and solve this problem on their own. The main culprit here is of course TCP's session based view of the world which was invented for a completely different era. An era when "cable got cut" was a catastrophic event that was almost never going to happen. It's a pity that the native app world is still mostly stuck with TCP/HTTP based networking stack where a UDP/mobile-specific-protocol is what's needed.

celticninja 10y ago

Get llama

jessriedel 10y ago

This exists on Android. If you enable the "developer settings" https://www.howtogeek.com/129728/how-to-access-the-developer-options-menu-and-enable-usb-debugging-on-android-4.2/ https://www.howtogeek.com/129728/how-to-access-the-developer... you then have the option to enable "Aggressive Wi-Fi to Cellular handover" > It just artificially reduces the WiFi RSSI (received signal strength indication) to encourage the WiFi state machine to decide to switch the connection from WiFi to cellular network. https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/90250/what-does-the-aggressive-wi-fi-to-cellular-handover-option-in-developer-settin https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/90250/what-does-... Anecdotally, I have had fewer headaches with the phone holding on to poor wifi-signals since I enabled this. Ideally the phone would handle this in a smarter way, e.g., by monitoring the strength of both the wifi and data signals and switching to whichever is likely to have the least packet loss.

chetanahuja 10y ago
> Ideally the phone would handle this in a smarter way, e.g., by monitoring the strength of both the wifi and data signals and switching to whichever is likely to have the least packet loss The tradeoff here of course is battery life. The phone OS doesn't want to switch on a second radio until absolutely necessary for obvious reasons.