I got a surprising notice near the end of last month that I was almost out of date for my phone for the month. Why is this surprising? Because I have my phone set to automatically go to the WiFi when I’m either at home or at work.
I checked, and sure enough, my phone was not using the wireless connection at my house when I went online to surf the web, play games and stream music and video.
How did it happen? Well, there was an Internet slowdown at home one evening and I turned off the WiFi connection on the phone and switched to the 4G connection provided by my cellular carrier to check out Facebook.
That would have been fine for a brief period of time. But I forgot to turn it back. I even did a Facebook Live video using the 4G connection. Over the course of the next two weeks, I used up a lot of data. The silly thing is that I could have spotted it immediately, just by looking at the top of my phone.
When you are connected through your cellular carrier, it will look like this and say 3G or 4G at the top.
When connected via WiFi, next to that 4G icon, you’ll see a little icon that looks like a fan. All I would have needed to do was look at the top.
To reconnect via WiFi, I could just swipe down from the top of my Android and tap that fan symbol.
If you aren’t set up to connect to WiFi automatically, go to settings on your phone and tap Wi-Fi.
Select the network and make sure to mark auto-connect.
~ Cynthia
Are the directions the same for IPhone? I just checked my IPhone but do not see auto-reconnect.
Thank you
iPhone is different. This article is for Android (the specific screenshots appear to be running Samsung’s overlay on top of Android. In other words, not stock Android.) Anyway, on iPhone you are connected to Wi-Fi if you see the same Wi-Fi symbol (but without the little gray arrows) the article talks about (see second picture) to the right of the Signal Dots in the top left hand corner. If you see “3G” or “LTE” instead than you may not be connected to a Wi-Fi network. An iPhone should be set to reconnect to KNOWN networks automatically. You can also check your Wi-Fi connections in the Settings app (Settings>Wi-Fi).
Hello. And Bye.