Airport Extreme (802.11n) - Connection drops (no auto-reset)

Helpful? Maybe.
http://gedblog.com/2008/02/20/solving-airports-mystery-dropouts/

I just switched to the Belkin G Wireless Plus Mimo router and so far have had no problems. Although it is still early (I've only had it a few days), I really think this is the answer. For some reason, the N routers cannot handle big packets of info. Or maybe in high traffic G or B network areas, it screws up. Either way, if you want an easy fix to this problem, pick up a G router. So far so good with the Belkin.

If you are using 802.11n only network and are experiencing Time Machine or other AirDisk problems with drop outs while coping files to an AirDisk, follow these steps:

1. Make sure you are using 7.3.1 AirPort Extreme firmware.
2. Go under the "Wireless" tab and click the "Wireless Options" button, UNCHECK "Use Wide Channels".
3. Apply Settings, and allow AirPort to restart.

"Wide Channels" reminds me of "Use Interference Robustness" with G networks (which you should also turn off if using a G network). Neither of those check boxes ever seemed to do anything more than cause random network drop outs. I have not noticed any speed differences on my small 5 device network.

Before I was getting dropouts after 3 or 4 gigabytes had copied over, now I can a consistent copy with no dropouts after successfully copying 200+ gigabytes in one copy.

with the latest update of the base station firmware, the reason for failures becomes clearer. The mechanism is still a bit cloudy, but what's going on is now obvious.

Something happens to cause the base station to lose its DNS connections. It can't find anything on the internet. Now, when the base station loses its DNS connections, it trips the Airport Utility to open up and tell you that the base station has lost its DNS entries, which it's getting from your internet router. Could be that it's overwhelmed, that the router has lost connection, or whatever.

When it's lost the DNS connection, the internet isn't available, while connections to other units on the airport network are still working.

In the current firmware, the condition will self-heal after a while, though all your applications that have internet connections may stay stalled until you refresh them.

That's what seems to be going on.

Interesting Theory,

Just an update for everyone, I went to the genius bar and they exchanged my airport extreme because the person serving me was having the same issue with his personal AE at home.

Got my new AE and I'm having the same issues so it's not a hardware problem.

Just a little FYI

I took mine back to the apple store as well and they handed me a new one but am having the same issues.

Another me too post... It's been months now, and still no fixes.

I must confess myself quite disappointed by now (to say the least).

I bought 1 Airport Extreme and 2 Airport Express base stations in order to create my home wi-fi LAN. I wasted 2 entire weeks trying to make them work only to find out that they simply DON'T. Now I'm just using one Express in order to use AirTunes and the other one + the Extreme are taking dust on a shelf. They've been there for months now, becoming obsolete and losing their value as Apple introduces new, cheaper wi-fi devices (Time Capsule & c.), decreasing the value of the items I purchased.

<Edited by Moderator>

Hi all

I too am a litle bit disap. with the speed benefits from 54Mbps to 300 Mbps...
Spend alot of euros to upgrade things to 300 Mbit...

- I setup my APExtreme to 5Ghz band, wide band, allowing extending my network.
So I connected my APExpress n to it...
- setup multicasting a 24 etc

My macmini 100 Mbit desktop is I think a slow bottle neck sadly but then again I hear that at 100 Mbit you could easily reach 10 Mb/sec at ethernet so no bottleneck I guess ?

But real live test : 1 Mb/sec downloading via 300 Mbit network [1 Nat, dhcp at router connected through wan] connecting to a 2 AP network 5ghz etc. But : downloading from a g4/1.25 1Gb mac mini... but hey. g4 is not so bad for filesharing is it ???


Any help on this one?

Next post will be a usb drive connected to the AP extreme to test my mbpro 300 Mbps....

I was able to solve the problem of my airport extreme randomly dropping the connection by turning off the Wide Channels option using the Airport Utility!

I did not even have the problem until I update the latest 4.10.08 airport extreme update. After that I would randomly lose the connection at least twice a day, sometimes more. After I turned off the Use Wide Channels option that is automatically turned on when you install the update, I have had no more drop outs - 3 days and counting. Hope this solution works for others.

Doug8867,

Thanks for the great advise. After struggling with dropped connections every few hours for the last several months, your suggestion seems to have done the trick. I have not experienced a single dropped connection in the last 48 hours.

Any improvement with the last sw update?

Z

Nope 😟

I'm having a similar issue. If I'm connected to the internet with my new 20" iMac and then my wife goes online using our G4 iBook, the iMac gets kicked off. If she shuts down the iBook, then the iMac reconnects. When this occurs, I can see network activity going out, but I can't receive any packets.

Besides the 1.07 GHz 12" iBook, we also have a G4 1.67 GHz PowerBook, a 1.33 GHz mac mini, two iPhones, a PS3 and Tivo. Everything is connected wirelessly and everything else seems to work fine with nothing else getting kicked off.

I use Mediacom and have called them a few times. Each time they say the problem is on my end. I tried two different AE 802.11n base stations and each had the problem. My guess is that it has something to do with connecting via "n", since all my other devices are "g".

Hopefully an Apple Tech is reading these posts and can solve our problems. Thanks! (I also posted this in another thread. Sorry, but I'm just trying to get this read and responded to.)