I got bit again by the “attwifi – Passpoint” policy/bug/feature again. I was sitting in the airport terminal trying to use my phone but was not able to get any Internet connection. I know AT&T coverage can be spotty in places where there are people but this was no data at all even though I had a few bars. I did a little troubleshooting to find out that my phone had spontaneously jumped on a Wi-Fi network without me asking it to do that.
Normally when you are connected to a Wi-Fi network there is an option to “Forget This Network”. But for this network, there was no such option. My only recourse was to turn off Wi-Fi altogether. Once I did this, my Internet was restore. My VPN did not like me coming from some random Wi-Fi network. When I turned Wi-Fi back on, my phone immediately jumped on this network. My only option seemed to be to turn off the “Auto-Join” feature for that network. I know from experience that this setting will not be respected in the future. I sometimes use Wi-Fi to connect to my camera or other device and do not want it jumping on strange networks.
I really do not like that my cellular provider has the ability to set networking parameters for connections outside of my cellular connection. It is irksome that there is no apparent configuration available to the end user to disable this bug/behavior.