Apple Watch and Wifi problem

Tech Support
1

I replaced my apple wifi routers with Netgear R7000 (two units). I have finally got them working well after disabling the “smart connect” feature which is supposed to smartly assign your devices to the appropriate band, ie 5G or 2.4G based on their capabilities.

I was seeing devices frequently being told to fall back to 2.4 which was effecting their connection speed. (Aside: whether or not this was a real world problem or not, as a geek it was unacceptable to me!). I found that disabling smart connect, which then splits 2.4 and 5G into separate SSIDs, devices only “knew” about the 5G network soall the devices connected and remained on 5G which basically solved the fallback problem. Extremely good speed (400Mbit/s at least) throughout my whole flat. I need the 2.4G network which I had to use for my Brother printer and a few IoT devices. Set them to use that, all good.

However, the apple watch (I have a series 4) is also a 2.4GHz only device. Now it doesn’t benefit from wifi. If my phone is in the bedroom and I walk to the living room the watch no longer works. I understand it simply connects to the same network as the phone. I want my phone connected to the 5GHz network. Since the 5GHz and 2.4GHz networks are bridged the watch would be able to see the iPhone.

Does anyone know of a way to manually set the network for the watch only?

There seems to be very little information online about wifi in the apple watch, only that its 2.4 GHz only (I guess due to power limitations).

2

And with all the googling and reading all manner of “blog posts” with all manner of missinformation about fooling your watch to connect to a 5GHz network (electronically impossible) the answer was right there in the list of results

I had wrongly assumed that apple watch could only copycat the phone’s wifi connection. I was wrong. I guess this was there all along or was added at some point. Actually I had no idea that there was a settings menu on the watch itself, I had always thought all config was done on the watch app on the phone. Anyway will leave this here and hope that the 3 other people on the planet with this problem also find it.

2 Likes