Wifi randomly saves ("remembers") unwanted networks

Help Fairphone 2
1

Hello all,

I looked for a similar topic but could not find one; if there is, please merge this in the other :slightly_smiling:

I have my FP2 since 2 weeks now and overall I am very happy with it. However I noticed something really strange with the wifi.

I am in a place where there are a lot of wifi networks with similar SSID (names), formatted like this:
“ABCD-1D”, “ABCD-1G”, “ABCD-2G”. They all have the same 4 first letters but the 2 last caracters indicate the floor of the building they are mostly accessible.

I use only 1 network, “ABCD-1D”, that I “saved” the 1st time I connected to it. A few days ago, I had some trouble connecting to the wifi (my phone did not auto-connect correctly) and I noticed that all the other networks were also “saved” (remembered) !

As I never added all these networks to my list of known networks, I imagine they were somehow “saved automatically” by my fairphone.
I never had the problem at home even if I see a lot of different wifi networks. This makes me think that it is linked to the fact that all networks in this building have similar names and probably provided by the same provider.

I removed all the other networks except the one I am using from my list of saved networks, but today I had the same issue again: phone did not connect automatically to my network, went to the “saved network” section and saw that all the other networks were there again.

Anyone having the same issue ? Or having a solution ?

Have a good day,
Nicolas

2

I can confirm this behavior, but it is not Fairphone specific. I had the same issue with my previous Android phone (Samsung Galaxy Note with CyanogenMod). Seems to be a generic Android bug.

At home I have a 5.2 GHz WiFi named AB_5.2_CD and a legacy 2.4 GHz WiFi named AB_2.4_CD. The networks use different WPA2 keys. I only configured AB_5.2_CD on the phone. But sometimes it tries to connect to AB_2.4_CD (and fails obviously). AB_2.4_CD also shows up on the list of saved networks. I can delete it, but after some time it reappears.

This really seems to be related to WiFi networks with (very) similar names.

3

Thank you for your answer;
I discussed this with a colleague who had the issue with a completely different phone using lollipop. So I confirm this is not fairphone specific.
But since it impacts the FP2… Anyone has an idea ?

How can just a “similar name” provoke this bug ?

I don’t know if a device recognizes a known WiFi only by its SSID, but maybe these networks could share a common ID used by the phone ?