A few months back, I was asked to troubleshoot a wifi problem on an iPhone 3G 8GB. The problem was that the wifi would be able to see the wireless networks in the area. However, when attempting to connect to a network, the iPhone would present a message saying that it was unable to connect to the network. This behavior exhibited itself when connecting to any wireless network, whether the network required authentication or not. After surveying the phone, duplicating the problem and asking the user what he had done just prior to this discovery, I briefly pondered what could cause this problem. I came to the possibility that some application installed on the iPhone caused the wifi problem. Based on what the user told me, I uninstalled a couple of apps he had installed an the problem vanished. It worked!
That was a few months ago. The user returned today and showed me the same problem. We think the problem returned this time because he restored his iPhone from an old backup, which could have restored the old app. Unfortunately, I don't remember which app was the problem. I've spent the afternoon trying to figure out which app while I was searching online for an answer. I came across the following:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2044754&start=0&tstart=0
http://www.everythingicafe.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-58045.html
The first link shows that it's a pretty widespread problem. In fact, this is the first time I've seen a discussion forum post with over 100 pages of posts. The second link has more advanced content about the potential problem, but still no real solution yet.
I'm still working on the app angle. Hopefully, I'll be able to figure out if it is indeed an app that is causing the problem. I didn't read through the 100+ pages of posts in the Apple Support page. But, in reading through many pages of posts, I don't see any indication that anyone has approached this problem from this angle. I frequently read that people restored their phones from backups after doing hard resets or getting a whole new phone. What if this restoration process just brought the problem back? I'll post more as I find out more.
Happy Computing.
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