Apple devices keep dropping off wifi
This will be hard to disentangle if you think of it as Apple vs Windows. A couple points.
- iOS devices are designed to drop WiFi all the time. Screen off, no power, no urgent sync or transfer - WiFi drops. You should be able to isolate your iOS device and you will need to get in to the WiFi radio / router and get precise logs on failed reconnects, RSSI - channel negotiated. Once you have one device and some facts - please post that as one thread and @ me. Then you can look at interference or stats and see what’s up.
- macOS should get you a second pattern of access - it won’t drop unless there’s a problem, is easier to manage sleep and keep it connected for days on end.
- Apple has configuration profiles, packet capture so if you suspect one not working, you can get precise detailed engineering details and know precisely what’s happening - frame by frame, millisecond by millisecond to get answers.
- In general - it’s never mac or windows or ios that causes issues - it’s just one device and fluid nature of baseband code - hopping MCS / encoding / power levels and sometimes channels. All this is invisible, highly technical, easy to get wrong and requires study and tools and setup to be disciplined to get detailed timing and logs.
- Before you do that - look at some summary traffic. For instance, I love my UniFi Dream Machine since it collects 95% of the statistics I need to diagnose failed reconnects, interference, faulty hardware for me automagically. I’ve heard good things on Eero - can you get a 24 hour history report for each of your devices? If you can send 10 GB of data on a device you think is failing to connect - you can be darn sure the radio is fine and the OS is fine and the network stack is fine. If it can’t reconnect - it’s going to be interference and not the device. If the device can’t even run a speed test when conditions are good - then you can suspect the OS or hardware. From your data so far, nothing seems to be client side and I would focus entirely on radio side until you know the radio is seeing a disconnect that doesn’t make sense on the client side.
Good luck - my advice is to take a break for a day or three, then pick one device only and get data, set a trap, collect traces. Don’t worry about anything else - it’s all noise and irrelevant. Once you are convinced that device is working and the only thing that can hurt it on WiFi is normal drop and interference, then look elsewhere. The last time I had this it was a USB-C Gigabit ethernet adapter connected to windows. It didn’t have problems since it was wired, but it kicked all the other devices off. In your case, if all the Apple devices are getting kicked - it’s probably not them causing it - they’re just alerting you that something else is the problem. But, why guess or go on hunches - you can get to the bottom of this by looking at one radio on one device and one radio on one AP.