(Dark Souls Font) WiFi Restored

Previously: My iPhone Hates My WiFi.

For about a year, iPhones in my household would frequently disconnect from the wifi, with no clear explanation or cause. After a month of frustration I got desperate enough to spend $300 on a Ruckus R350 access point that didn’t help (NB: an access point is “the thing that makes the wifi”). And then I just… gave up for almost a year, I guess. Well, my blog post a couple weeks ago got me interested in doing a little more debugging. The next time my phone claimed to be connected-but-not to the wifi (with a connection listed in the system settings but not in the status bar at the top of the screen), I went into the connection details to see… nothing in the DHCP section!

I confirmed that DHCP seemed messed up the next couple times the connection faltered. Sometimes the whole DHCP section was blank, and sometimes I had a garbage address in 169.254/16. My good friend Liz, who knows much more about networking than I, informed me that the 169.254/16 block is reserved for link-local addresses and generally indicates a DHCP failure.

My landlord has graciously included a $50 surcharge on my monthly rent for mandatory Xfinity internet service, so I’ve been using the Xfinity-provided modem up until now. I’ve never really liked this (there is something very unnerving about Xfinity having my wifi password) and the DHCP logs available to me in the modem’s web interface were nonexistent, so at this point I was forced to accept the conclusion I’d been trying desperately not to reach for almost a year: after spending $300 on a new access point, I needed to pony up even more cash for a new modem. For reasons I don’t really understand, your ISP needs to approve of the specific modem you’re using; you can’t just get a random DOCSIS 3.1 modem. So I went to dig up the list of Xfinity-approved modems and saw the Unifi UCI listed as an option. Well, the dolls seem to like the Ubiquiti hardware, so I went for it. Who can resist the allure of bead-blasted galvanized steel and those adorable little touch screens?

A couple days later, my shiny new modem arrived, so I unboxed it and plugged it in:

Me: might be time to set up a modem
Me: how hard could it possibly be
Me: wait do i need a gateway -_-
Liz: …yes.
Me: Fuck
Me: liz…
Me: what is a gateway
Liz: some kind of main router, y’know
Liz: idk if the uniif [sic] cable modem does that! or if it’s just a modem!
Liz: but knowing unifi it’s probably just a modem.
Me: i have switches. i have an access point.
Liz: but you need a ROUTER
Me: fuuuuuuuuuuck
Me: g-d dammit
Liz: lmao

So I bought a Unifi gateway. In for a penny, in for a pound, right? At this point in my adventure a $200 gateway-cum-access-point seemed downright thrifty to me. I got the gateway set up and… everything has worked perfectly. Nobody in my home has found themselves unexpectedly disconnected from the internet. I can finally stop thinking about it!! The Ubiquiti management interface and app are extremely slick, surfacing tons of useful information: latency and throughput graphs, alerting when the internet goes down, and, of course, an (empty!!!) log of DHCP failures.

Thus ends the 2024–2025 Bad WiFi Saga!