How To Get The Max Download Speed Out Of Your iPhone

Zohaib Ahmed/SlashGear

A lot of times, slow speeds on your iPhone come down to your Wi-Fi router working against you. Sure, cellular data issues play a part too, but we’ll get to those later. The most common culprit you may not have realized is your phone picking the wrong Wi-Fi band. Most routers today broadcast what’s called a simultaneous dual-band network. There’s the 2.4GHz band and the faster 5GHz band. The catch is that once your phone latches onto one, it tends to stay there. And that pick isn’t always the fastest option. Rather, it usually goes with whichever signal is strongest, which almost always means the slower 2.4GHz. But that stronger signal tops out at between 100 and 150Mbps, which is glacial by 2026 standards. So if your actual Wi-Fi speed is a lot slower than what you are paying for, as was the case for this user on Apple forums, you might want to double-check the bands.

To fix, log into your router’s settings and split both bands into separate networks. Name them accordingly too so you can tell the two apart at a glance. Then get your iPhone to manually connect to 5GHz. Your phone will then have no ambiguity about which one to use. That said, 5GHz has a shorter range than 2.4GHz, so it works best when you’re in the same room as the router or relatively close to it.

You can hedge against this by turning on Wi-Fi Assist. Flip it on, and your phone stops clinging to 5GHz once you wander too far for the speeds to hold up. Without it, an iPhone could sometimes hang…

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