iPhone 5C thinks it is still on Wifi at home even when modem turned off?

[gaken]

Hi all;

I have a strange one here.  My wife and both recently obtained iPhone 5Cs.  Generally we have had a good experience in using them but have noticed a little "quirk" at home.  We are away from home all day at work, and as a matter of habit we always turn our modem off as we are going out the door.  We figure it's just a good security practice to have, on top of already having a password for our home network.  Anyway, my wife found herself at work the other day without her phone.  She figured she laid it down on the kitchen table to attend to something else on the way out and forgot to pick it back up.  She attempted to verify this by using the icloud "find my phone" feature and got a message that her phone was offline.  I find this odd, as I thought the phone would automatically go to the LTE network when no wifi is available.  It in fact does so everywhere else we are; at home is the only place we experience this.  I have found this is the case with my phone as well.  I have turned off the modem and found in the phone settings that it is showing it is still connected to our home network.  However when I try to check e-mail, open Safari, etc -- I get message that my network is not available.  I don't know if this is relevant, but our ISP is Comcast, and we have an old Motorola modem that they say is near obsolete but seems to still be working fine.  I guess the good news is we have no problems with our home wife the way a lot of other posters do, but this is a curious situation that is kind of bothering me.

Any and all ideas or suggestions welcome.

[vzw_customer_support]

gaken,
Let's look further into this! Your wife could have experienced the offline message due to Location Services being off. She can test again with Location Services on in Settings>Privacy>Location Services> scroll all the way to the bottom to Find My iPhone and turn on. When you connect to your modem at home do you turn cellular data off? Does your device connect to cellular data once you attempt to use data services? Please share.

TominqueBo_VZW
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[gaken]

Well I'm not sure about my wife's phone, but my location services are turned on, and as I indicated the same thing is happening to me.  Our phones connect to the wifi at home automatically without us taking any further action, so I guess the answer is "no" -- we do not turn our cellular data off.  Once on wifi at home, all our data services -- e-mail, web browsing, etc. -- are done over the home network.

[#4 · Accepted solution]

You are a mite confused.

The iPhone unless the cellular data is fully off will revert to cellular even if on WiFi if the WiFi connection is not on.

You have a modem from Comcast, however do you have a wireless router? You see a modem that connects to the internet when turned off does not affect the broadcast connections to your phones if WiFi is on.

So the WiFi finds your devices however it has no access to internet services. If your wife and you have cellular turned off and you turn off the Comcast modem you have no cellular or broadband connection to anything.

In this case the Find my iPhone will show the device as off. Because there is no signal either on WiFi /modem and cellular.

Hope that helped?

[gaken]

Yes, we do have a router.  I thought that was sort of implied in my question but sorry if not clear.  So, just to make sure I understand, the router -- even thought the modem may be off -- is still sending out a signal which our phones will automatically connect to, i.e. our home network?  And by extension, I would think that means if I were to turn off the router as well, our phones would then go to the LTE network?

[#6]

Correct!

As I said if the cellular data is on; as you said it is.  you will use cellular data over using your WiFi since the modem and the router are both off.

On iphones if you turn cellular data off, you can still make and receive phone calls but that will be it

At my home I use WiFi constantly, I turn cellular data off. This way when I plug into charge it will not revert to Verizon's data network and stays on sleep mode for home WiFi.

You will get the hang of it.