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You explained why this might be happening technically but why are you acting like it's okay? "Just VPN home" is not a solution if the phone is preferring a terrible one bar connection over the home one. Imagine the quality of that vpn connection you're suggesting as a fix.

I invite the WiFi Alliance to participate more in 3GPP meetings and straighten out the standard for handover between LTE/5G and Passpoint WiFi networks then.

How gracious. In exchange, I invite all of the 3GPP stakeholders to respect people's technological autonomy and refrain from enabling solutions that force crap down their throats.

This isn't about technological autonomy. OP signed up for wireless service that is specifically sold as Hotspot WiFi-first. That's one of its main features. It's sold as that very, very clearly. If you don't want their WiFi, go get service from another provider!

Just because a service is marketed as having a feature doesn't mean they have an excuse to undo a user setting in their OS that explicitly says they don't want to use it. Maybe they do want to connect to the advertised network when traveling but auto connect shouldn't be forced on them. I don't understand why you are trying to defend this so adamantly.

> OP signed up for wireless service that is specifically sold as Hotspot WiFi-first

No I didn’t. I bought cell service, they advertise that they also offer hotspots but all the carriers do that.

Nowhere did I sign up for unauthorized modifications of my owned devices wifi stack.

If you have a better solution than the 3GPP and member parties i.e. carriers have come up with I invite you to build your own better network experience and handsets rather than just posting snark. Perhaps try mounting some hubcaps to trees.

I don’t think 3GPP is on trial here, seizing customer owned wifi radios is

> Just build your own network.

I did build my own network, and my ability to connect to it was forcibly overridden with no way to opt out.

That is entirely the point.

Edit: rulebreaking removed.

And I invite the 3GPP alliance and Apple to stay the hell out of my Wi-Fi preferences (or at least give me a clear option of opting out of autoconnecting).

Their job is to get my phone on a 3GPP network, and (already a stretch) to possibly offer a reasonable default of autoconnecting to secure Wi-Fi networks that can alleviate mobile network load in crowded locations, but never in preference over my home network, and never ever without a way to opt out of all of it.

This has nothing to do with your preferences. This is network management pure and simple. This is how you implement efficient infrastructure in congested locations like stadiums, airports, and large retail (where you may have no signal at all). Whether the cellular radio or wifi radio is used has nothing to do with you; you are paying for a connection and there are some very intelligent people tasked with figuring out the best way to solve that problem. Because if they didn't, your phone wouldn't have connectivity in those locations and you'd be on here complaining that their service sucks

Whatever strategy is implemented it absolutely should respect the user preference for which wifi network is preferred. How can you defend getting in the way of a user connecting to their home network when at home? Seriously, address that particular concern and maybe we can have a debate.

That’s all fine and even laudable if it works (and does not actually degrade quality more often than not), until it disrupts my ability to connect to my own network in any way (which has devices on it I can‘t reach from my mobile operator’s network).

This is bullshit apologetics. The WiFi radio is mine, not the carrier’s. This completely screws up connections to p2p WiFi stuff (odb reader, private camera network, etc).

Either the device serves me and follows my commands, or it's not my device anymore.

This bullshit is exactly why Stallman was right.

If I make a decision, the device should obey me and no one else.

You've got no consent whatsoever to overrule the user's decision.

> If I make a decision, the device should obey me and no one else.

There's obviously limits to this, and in fact network traffic management is commonly agreed to be one of them. You can't tell your iPhone to blast on the channel of an operator you have no contractual agreement with.

The same goes for Wi-Fi on 5 GHz: You get to use these frequencies, but by law, device manufacturers are required to implement an algorithm that gives the primary user (weather radars important to aviation safety) priority. Patching out that algorithm could actually cost lives.

Where exactly your freedom ends, and that of the general public begins, is a fascinating and important conversation: Should you be allowed to skew your 802.11 or TCP implementation's congestion management algorithms to get priority for the data you send, for example? (All it takes is changing the multiplicative decrease factor up, or the random waiting time after a collision down a bit!)

What's the boundary of where your device ends: The baseband? The 802.11 hardware radio? The kernel, running your 802.11 soft-PHY driver? Userspace? I don't think it's a purely technical question with an easy technical answer.

Personally, I'm fine with my phone coming with a default setup to trust my operator's Wi-Fi networks, but only if the device vendor can absolutely make sure that my home network will be preferred, and in any case with a clear opt-out switch.

> There's obviously limits to this, and in fact network traffic management is commonly agreed to be one of them. You can't tell your iPhone to blast on the channel of an operator you have no contractual agreement with.

Why shouldn't I?

Sure, if I do so, I'll end up with a massive fine from the BNetzA, FCC, or equivalent local authority, but that's still my problem. I agree that freedoms are limited, but you can't enforce social restrictions with technological solutions.

The device should obey me, nothing else. I'm not going to accept devices becoming ever more locked down.

And it's not like it helps, either – I can just as well take an SDR and do the very same myself without any restrictions.

> The baseband? The 802.11 hardware radio? The kernel, running your 802.11 soft-PHY driver? Userspace?

Kernel, drivers, userspace have to be 100% under control of the users. Ideally, hardware should also be entirely under control of the user.

It's already so much work to custom patch the firmware on my cameras to e.g. allow using certain file formats without requiring the storage medium to have been certified by the manufacturer.

I'm already transplanting ICs from the manufacturer's original toner cartridges for my printer to circumvent the shitty DRM brother now introduced as well.

I've already got to use custom devices to strip HDCP so I can watch movies on my PC. My secondary monitor is a really high quality one from 2004 which is still better than many today, if I was bound by some shitty limitations I'd have to turn this into e-waste.

I’m already building customized kernel drivers for some of my WiFi cards because the official ones apply US channel restrictions even outside of the US, which means I've got less spectrum available than I should have.

I want this to be reduced, not increased. I want to move into a future where I need to make less such changes and devices obey me without question.

> Just VPN back to your home network if you're not confident in their security.

I’m sorry but wtf?

You’re saying that, in my own home, I should just accept that my devices connect to an external wifi against my will and VPN back into my own home… while in my home?

Seriously?

(Gonna assume you have a cable MVNO still)

Yes. You signed up for a cable provider mobile service. A huge part of their whole value proposition for their service is "get access to millions of cable WiFi hotspots!" That's their product. They plaster it everywhere in all their ads.

Your situation with Pi-hole and firewalls etc. is a niche use case. Their service is made to appeal to people who are 1) cable company customers and 2) want cheaper service. The majority of people who fall into those categories have an Xfinity router at home that broadcasts the Passpoint SSID. The phones connect to that SSID and have service. Passpoint is going to be more secure than any WPA2/3 network anyway.

If you don't want that to happen, then get a different mobile provider. This one is not for you.

I signed up for cellphone service.

Absolutely no where did I consent to have my devices (yes, my owned devices not leased/payment planned) suddenly lock me out of basic networking settings.

This is almost as stupid as buying a Walmart keyboard and finding out plugging it in disables eth0 because you might load Amazon.

Xfinity hardware provides a separate SSID that uses WPA2/3 to secure your connection and a SSID for "Xfinity WIFI". On Android one can and should in fact select which nodes to connect to not merely whether to connect to all nodes but whether to connect to individual nodes. This is essential because in real world non test environments real customers using real networking hardware and phones do not handle adjacent networks well because signal strength varies wildly throughout their space resulting in devices roaming back and forth for no fucking good reason. This is especially true in dense environments like apartment buildings.

Xfinity customers using xfinity wifi on their android device NEVER experience conflict from dancing between AP with xfinitywifi in their home or from their neighbors unless they explicitly connect to adjacent networks and if they do so they can correct the issue by long pressing on the undesired AP name and selecting "forget".

Nobody cares what a company thinks they signed up for. They give essentially two shits. They pay tech companies to solve their problems and expect solutions that work. The situation as described doesn't work for normal network conditions and equipment. The fact that it also breaks niche stuff that techies like is just diarrhea icing on a shit cake.

WiFi isn’t just for accessing the Internet. It’s also for accessing other devices on your home network such as printers. This is a broken implementation with no room for argument.

You can restrict apps from using the internet in the cellular menu. But with wifi, they can communicate unrestricted.

That’s a very obvious omission in the iOS privacy/security settings I‘ve never understood.

Why can I grant fine-grained access to my photos, location etc., but not just outright denying network access to an app that works offline, which would make all of the other concerns mostly moot?

> Just VPN back to your home network if you're not confident in their security.

So you expect the average user to be able to set up a Zeroconf/mDNS-proxying VPN, since that’s the only type that will allow things like Google Cast or AirPrint to still work?

Home networks are not just about security or speed, some people have devices on them they can otherwise not reach.

Having multiple adjacent networks enabled is liable to cause customer devices to roam between access points on and off their LAN even when

- Remote access point doesn't provide access to desired resources

- Have acceptable performance

- Have acceptable security parameters according to users needs

Most users can't stand up a vpn inside their network and configure it to alleviate the self inflicted wound of having their phone decide that the user isn't qualified to select the wifi access points it prefers to connect to. You may as well ask them to grow wings and skip Delta. Instead they will be placing irate calls to their ISP about why their wifi sucks so much and I will be silently cursing Apple.

Thank you for adding some technical context to this discussion. There's a lot of (sadly) uninformed people in this thread spitting mad prophesying about a topic they clearly do not understand with any technical depth. If only the retail stores replaced their enterprise gear for EAP with a "pi hole". P.S. nice username