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My phone keeps leaving the setup network

What the ticker shows while it joins: the setup network goes down at this point, by design

Symptoms

The setup page shows ⚠️ I've lost touch with your setup device (phone/tablet/PC). Usually that means it left my setup Wi-Fi — but I can also go quiet for a while when I'm busy joining your network. Or the phone’s Wi-Fi settings show it back on your home network without you touching them, and the setup page will not load.

Cause

Phones and tablets treat a network with no internet as broken and hop back to the last good one on their own, and the CT network deliberately has no internet. The setup page’s first card warns about it: If your phone warns you there's no internet right now, that's normal here. Two other things look the same from the page’s side: the ticker goes quiet for some seconds while it scans or joins a network, and the ticker shuts the CT network down the moment it has joined your Wi-Fi, which is success, not a fault.

The setup page’s first welcome card, warning that a no-internet notice on the CT network is normal9:41192.168.4.1

Fix

  1. Decide where you were. If you had already tapped Connect and the ticker’s screen shows You're all set! or has restarted onto your Wi-Fi, nothing is wrong: the page says Then this is normal: I shut my setup Wi-Fi down and joined your home network. Put your phone on your usual Wi-Fi and open the address the ticker showed; see Find the settings page after setup.
  2. If you had not got that far, open the phone’s Wi-Fi settings and rejoin the CT network. If the phone asks whether to stay connected without internet, say yes.
  3. Go back to the setup page. It resumes where you were; a password you typed is kept while the page stays open.
  4. If the page shows an address under Back on your home Wi-Fi already?, the ticker has already reported it: put the phone on your home network and type that address into the browser.

If that didn’t work