Saturday, June 24, 2017

iPhone 6 WiFi + Bluetooth interference

I have switched my data plan from VIVA to Ooredoo because the wifi download speed was miserable and to my shock, after signing a data contract with Ooredoo, the download speeds were even worse. I went to Ooredoo tech support and spent over two hours trying to figure out what's wrong with the data line to no avail. One guy suggested that the problem is caused by my iPhone which I doubted at the time because my phone line was also Ooredoo and I get download speeds up to 60mbps!

I looked it up online and there were many suggestions that it could be caused by wifi network settings in the privacy>locations pane. When I turned it off I got slightly higher speeds but nothing more than a couple of mbps, from around 1~3mbps up to 5~7mbps.

After a couple of trial and error attempts I turned off Bluetooth which has been always on paired with my Garmen watch and guess what, the speeds jumped all the way over 40mbps!

Now I can confirm that this interference is causing the problem because my wife's iPhone 6 also had the same problem and I was able to surpass it only by switching off Bluetooth.