Dead Wi-Fi? My iPhone knows

Today I noticed something peculiar about my iPhone. Despite my presence in the massive IDG office and lawn tennis complex, the iPhone was telling me that it was using AT&T’s EDGE network for Internet access.

We’ve got an in-building network, appropriately named IDG, so that didn’t really make sense to me. When I went to my iPhone’s Settings window, the phone claimed to be connected to the IDG Wi-Fi network, but no dice. I restarted: nothing. I started to think that my desire to use iFuntastic to add the “Wonder Pets” theme song as my ringtone had led to the destruction of my iPhone’s networking capabilities.

In a last-ditch effort, I re-entered the Wi-Fi settings area, tapped on the blue arrow next to the IDG base station, and entered the advanced network settings panel. And I found something interesting: it didn’t list any assigned IP address for my iPhone. I’ve seen this sort of thing before on my Mac: it’s what can happen if a wireless base station is turned on, but not actually hooked up to the Internet.

I went back to my MacBook, unplugged its Ethernet cable, and confirmed that the problem was with our Wi-Fi network not being connected to the rest of the office network. Our IT staff showed up and fixed the problem, and now my MacBook and iPhone are using the office Wi-Fi with ease.

This little adventure taught me something, however: the iPhone’s really quite smart about networking. It didn’t get confused about the fact that it was connected to a Wi-Fi base station. Since that base station couldn’t supply it with network access, it switched to EDGE and got the job done.

Yes, that’s exactly how such a device is supposed to work. But my long experience with computers and various gadgets tells me that most devices wouldn’t do it that way.