My wife's cheap Samsung-android phone had some issues with wifi and mobile data after the last update it had. Symptoms were that wifi simply didn't work and mobile data was impossibly slow until the phone was rebooted. Logs in my mikrotik router showed "unicast key exchange timeout". Didn't resolve until I performed a factory reset on the phone and it has been great since.
jamesrt: ...and I've turned off the IPv6 on my router.
Just seemed to be causing too much instability and timeouts. My phone in particular really didn't like it; I was getting WiFi dropouts, really bad performance on basic things [browsing and email, for example], etc. It's a fairly modern phone running Nougat [Android 7.0] too, which is odd.
Pity.
Ipv6 won't cause Wifi drops outs and unfortunately most sites don't have ipv6 enabled still (sad!). So seems unlikely to be the cause.
Yes, I agree - IPv6 should not directly be causing an issue.
Never-the-less, I was having connectivity issues from the phone, and the visible symptom was the phone's WiFi icon disappearing, and then the phone's 3G and/or 4G icon appearing as it was "falling back" to 3G or 4G data. After a wee while, the WiFi icon comes back. Meanwhile, all data connections from the phone get dropped (they don't like switching IP addresses mid-stream; can't say I blame them!).
Also, the phone wouldn't easily and quickly connect to Google Services (like the playstore, etc).
So, whilst (as you say) the IPv6 presence in itself won't affect WiFi Signal Strength or anything like that, the phone may be deciding the WiFi is "unstable" due to connectivity issues to "upstream" and then logically falling-back to using Mobile Data. Modern phones will insist on trying to be "helpful"!!! (Sarcasm intended).
My wife's older (Android 4-based Samsung) didn't seem to be doing this - at least, she wasn't complaining to me about it!
Sounddude: So seems unlikely to be the cause.
At a technical level of how a WiFi works, I entirely agree. But from a "user experience" level of "can I use my devices without having problems", then with IPv6 on, I get problems; with it off, they immediately go away.
I need to do some more investigation. I'm not running my WiFi directly off the Orcon router; as I have a TrueNet probe, I'm doing the "right" thing by their instructions, and using it as the WiFi point. Perhaps that's causing some issue (although it should just be doing layer 2 bridging between WiFi and Ethernet, and shouldn't care about the IP protocol in use, but who knows??).
When I get more time over the weekend, I'll flick back to using the NF4V's WiFi and/or the other WiFi point I've got lying around. There are probably settings I can fiddle with on the phone, too.
As much as I'm a geek and like playing with new toys, at the end of the day, however, it all just needs to work together without being a pain in the ass. And it's currently not doing that.
Which is what I said previously - "pity". I'd like it to work. And "it" (being defined as "the seamless user experience") currently isn't working.
Have switched from using the TrueNet Probe as my WiFi AP to using the Orcon Router as the WiFi AP; and IPv6 re-enabled again.
Everything now appears rock-solid; the mysterious delays are gone, and I've not noticed any issues with the WiFi on my phone "falling back" to mobile data.
Odd that just changing the AP on my network is enough to resolve that issue. I guess that whatever the TrueNet probe is doing was causing the issue - I know it's supposed to "detect traffic" and not run tests that would consume all my upstream bandwidth - perhaps that code only looks at IPv4 traffic, rather than raw packets???
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