iOS Devices Taking Longer To Connect Recently

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Hi everyone,

I have noticed that iOS devices have been taking longer to connect to wifi over the last 6-8 months or something like that. They used to connect in about 1-2 seconds after booting. But lately it has consistently been around 6-8 seconds. I just don't know how to figure out what the cause of this could be.

  • no changes have been made to wireless config or network config
  • WRT3200ACM (mwlwifi) running bare bones 23.05.2
  • 5GHz / WPA2 / Channels 149 and occasionally 36

I wanted to rule out the recent changes to mwlwifi as a possible cause of this issue. So I installed an mwlwifi driver from 2020 and the issue still persists. So it is not recent changes to mwlwifi causing this.

Is it possible that the switch from wolfssl to mbedtls as default ( [OpenWrt Wiki] OpenWrt 23.05.0 - First Stable Release - 13 October 2023) could cause this?

I suppose it could also be something on Apple's end with recent iOS updates causing this too. I just don't know how to narrow this down.

Thank you.

2

That aspect would be easy to test, by replacing mbedtls based wpad packages with their wolfssl or openssl counterparts (at runtime, using opkg; or at build time) - it's possible (no idea how likely it is, as I have neither mwlwifi nor iOS devices around; but my gut feeling wouldn't expect it).

3

Thank you. I will give this a try tonight by switching to wolfssl just to rule it out at least. I just have to make sure I plan this better because last time that I attempted this I lost all wifi. So I've downloaded all wolfssl-related packages including dependencies just in case and have more methods to try. I will share my results later.

4

The switch to wpad-basic-wolfssl was successful. However, it did not solve the problem of iOS devices taking longer to connect unfortunately.

Clearly this is a deeper rooted issue and likely a rabbit hole not worth going down. A few extra seconds of difference is probably not worth worrying over.