Q: Web pages loading slowly on macbook air with xfinity wireless gateway

Bizarre. I’ve been watching MenuMeters > Network and and Wireless Diagnostics > Utilities > Performance while streaming music and look at the readout:

Definitely while streaming trance music the noise level more baseline but then when the radio is silent noise is all over the place (red line, about 3 minutes in the scale). This also shows up in iTunes when starting a stream, I have been seeing more of a delay than in my last Macbook that died 3 weeks ago, which had no WiFi problems with my Zoom modem-router. And I am seeing faster page loads while music is streaming.

So I took the Xfinity Arris modem-router into Comcast today and said it and told them it didn’t fix the problem. I didn’t try the 25% power on the Arris, it was just there to compare to the Zoom 5352, as a diagnostic. But I can honestly say this problem was common to these two Comcast routers and my 3 week old Macbook Pro.

If anyone is having this problem I recommend turning your router’s trransmit power as low as it can go, and stream music during websurfing.

There’s some evidence the WiFi radio in my new MacBook Pro is defective.:

1) This non-connection problem to WiFi also occured on my iPhone while in the vicinity of the MBP, leading me to suspect the router.

2) The problem happened on 2 routers, the Xfinity Arris and the Zoom 5352, causing me to believe it was Comcast.

But these conditions could also occur while the Macbook is idling its radio. I had better go to the Apple Store tomorrow. I don’t think this could be a software bug. Or could it?

From About the OS X Mavericks v10.9.4 Update

About the update

The OS X Mavericks 10.9.4 Update is recommended for all Mavericks users. It improves the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac.

This update:

• Fixes an issue that prevented some Macs from automatically connecting to known Wi-Fi networks
• Fixes issue causing the background or Apple logo to appear incorrectly on startup
• Improves the reliability of waking from sleep
• Includes Safari 7.0.5

For detailed information about the security content of this update, see Apple security updates.

Everyone having a wifi radio (or four - 2.4, 5) and 2x2 MIMOs (very soon to be 4x4 MIMOs and then some more), it is a wifi jungle. On an Apple Airport device, the default operating power is 100%, and they can only be turned down (lowered) in terms of power.

The beacon-formation technique used in outdoor wifi APs making it into indoor APs is a positive step in better RF management - http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1234000001739/ch04.html

Gnarlodious wrote:

 

Definitely while streaming trance music the noise level more baseline but then when the radio is silent noise is all over the place (red line, about 3 minutes in the scale).

1. You already have an RF connection (the music stream) that is being used to add additional frames of data.

2. Your graph shows very good signal. Perhaps APs are learning transcendental meditation.

Gnarlodious wrote:

 

This also shows up in iTunes when starting a stream, I have been seeing more of a delay than in my last Macbook that died 3 weeks ago, which had no WiFi problems with my Zoom modem-router. And I am seeing faster page loads while music is streaming.

The battle is now for battery longevity for laptops. In your console logs, you can see the radios becoming silent. The delay is to power them back up, The older MBP were less aggressive in terms of battery conservation.

For iDevices, you can see a similar behavior in console logs that are visible via the iPhone Configuration Utility. In this case, the desire for a 'quality' signal wins the battle over battery longevity. This is due to the nature of outdoor AP deployments and every AP trying to seduce the iDevice with the come hither look. As the batteries get older, it is very painful to maintain charge. Put an iDevice in the mix and you can see it in your performance charts.

I am running 10.9.4 (build 13E28) and have no problem reconnecting to known networks. However this morning the internet was dead upon waking the computer. I had to shut off WiFi and restart it, then it connected normally and internet started working. That validates what you said about agressive sleeping of the WiFi unit, so maybe it IS a software issue!

Also, I spent some time reading http://www.dslreports.com/forum/comcast and it appears there are MANY complaints about Xfinity’s Docsis 3 routers having connection problems. In most cases they are not so severe, so I suspect those router’s radios are overmodulating at 100% amplification. But… couple that with a Macbook’s RF noise at idle and yeah you could see failure to talk after a power saving session.

On this topic, I did look for an iPhone app for WiFi diagnostics but it seems Apple has limited software access to the inner workings of the iPhone’s radio due to privacy concerns. You are pretty much stuck with Wireless Diagnostics on your portable.

I reset my Zoom 5352’s WiFi to to defaults for experimentation and my router peaks at 32% S/N ration transmitting 100% power. Horrible horrible noise level, no wonder the Macbook can't connect.

When I set power down to 50% suddenly noise drops to 24% peaking, but the WiFi still drops out with no automatic reconnection.

When I set the power to 25% the noise drops to 21% peaking and dropouts still occur within a minute, but it is able to reconnect within a minute.

With streaming music the noise level peaks at 18% and the connection is better, buffering may occur every 3 minutes. Not too good. These results for a 802.11n connection.

So I turned off N mode to force connection with G mode. Peaking S/Ns went down to 16% when idling and 14% while streaming music. Averages fall between 11 and 14, and no dropouts occur.

So it looks like N mode is bad news on my Macbook Pro with a Comcast router. Just too noisy for good throughput.

Gnarlodious wrote:

 

On this topic, I did look for an iPhone app for WiFi diagnostics but it seems Apple has limited software access to the inner workings of the iPhone’s radio due to privacy concerns. You are pretty much stuck with Wireless Diagnostics on your portable.

There are diagnostics logs on the iDevices that can be extracted via something like iPhone Configuration Utility 3.6.2 for Windows and iPhone Configuration Utility 3.5 for Mac OS X