One of the Geekabit Wi-Fi team came across a frustrating but interesting issue just recently, when browsing the internet on an iPhone 6. In iOS 8.1 and using Chrome or Safari, around a fifth of attempts to load a webpage would stall at approximately 20% loaded.
No matter how much time our Geek gave it, the iPhone would never finish loading the page. Refreshing the page sometimes worked, and everything would often be fine moments later… until the next page loading ‘stall’. The same problem appeared to be affecting Mail and some other apps – the inbox just wouldn’t update some of the time and worked seamlessly at other times.
So, all very strange. A visit to the Genius bar to speak to Apple proved fruitless (haha!) as the same problem could not be replicated in their store…
It seemed the problem was more to do with the home router settings than the iPhone itself, so our Geek started to investigate the channel width of the router. It seemed likely that the router’s 5GHz setting was defaulting to just provide the newer, wider and often troublesome 80MHz channel width, when it should have been set to 40MHz, or even possible 20MHz – after some fiddling with the settings on the router our tame Geek was oncec again able to enjoy speedy and uninterrupted browsing on his iPhone.
