Configuring iOS not to use internet from wifi or ethernet

By default, iOS tries to use internet from an ethernet (wired) network connection. If that's not available, iOS will try to use internet from wifi (wireless). If that's not available, iOS will try to use internet from cellular data.

That's not always what you want: you might want your internet from wifi even though your ethernet is connected, because your ethernet is connected to a print server that has no internet access.

In this article we'll show you how to tell iOS, "hey, don't try to get the internet from this network!" ... where "network" is either an ethernet network or a wifi netowrk.

How to do it

Open the Settings App and choose your network

First, open the Settings App.

Then, either choose "Ethernet" if you want to stop iOS from trying to get internet access via ethernet, or, choose Wi-Fi if you want to stop iOS from trying to get internet access via wifi.

If you choose Ethernet, then all you need to do for the next step is choose the Ethernet adapter. In most cases you only have one.
If you choose wifi, you need to connect to the wifi network, then hit the little "i" icon next to the wifi network name as shown by the red arrow in the following image

Showing how to open wifi network settings; DNPWCM-ca4 is the wifi network in this case

Looking at the network settings

When you first open the network you'll probably see that it is set to "Automatic" and that "Router" has an IP address assigned. When a network has a "router" set, the iPad tries to use it for internet access, which is not what we want.

Here's what you're probably seeing:

iPad set to use this wifi network for internet, because Router is set

We'd love to just erase the "Router" value and be done, but iOS will not let us — first we have to change the IP from "automatic" to manual mode to be able to do this.

Change the IP address from "auto" to "manual"

First, note down the IP address (in the example screenshot above, the IP is 192.168.4.162). You're going to use this in the next step.

Next, touch the "Configure IP: Automatic" row and:

change it to manual,
type in the IP address you noted down in the last step
set the subnet mask to 255.255.255.0
make sure the router field is empty/blank
... don't forget to hit "Save" at the top-right

Here's what that looks like when you've entered all the information, right before you hit Save:

Verify our changes

Here's what you see when you've done it successfully:

iPad wifi network settings showing no router

... that's it, you're done! These settings will be remembered for the next time you connect to this network.

If in the future things stop working, follow the steps above and change the "Configure IP" back to "Automatic".

Configuring iOS *not* to use internet from wifi or ethernet