Q: MacBook Pro constantly losing wireless connectivity

Hi gladvlad, take a look here for a MacBook Pro Core Duo:
http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac/MacBook-Pro-15-Inch-Core-Duo/Airport-Extreme/85/ 13/Page-1
Other guides are available for other macs.
Regards, AF

Alessandro,
I did not read your message in time, I tried myself using smcFanControl and you are right: it does not make a difference.

The temperature that is displayed by smcFanControl looks anyway absolutely acceptable (~34C) and - to say it all - the MBP feels icy under my fingers. It is so hard to imagine it is an Airport card overheating problem.

I don't have the time to try using ice before next weekend, it would be anyway quite ludicrous that that was the way to get it working. I am getting so frustrated by all of this!!! A £2,000 brick...

Giacecco

Just wanted to add my name to the long list of people having wireless connection issues. Strangely, my Core Duo wireless connection has been working great since I got it (almost 2 years i think... it's the original lineup), UNTIL I updated to 5.5.4. I was hoping 5.5.5 would fix the issue, but to no avail. It is definitely not my router, as the wireless connection is also either nil or bad at work, in cafes... everywhere now, not just at home. Plus my wife's Macbook connects file to my home network. Alot of the time it detects the signal in the list of available networks, but the connection fails after a minute or so of trying to connect. I CAN however connect to my home network if I'm very near the router (say within 5 feet), but the signal is weak. It's getting more than a bit annoying to say the least, and I can't really afford to put it in service for several days, but I may have to. I'll let you know if anything comes of it. In the meantime I will quote from ffredburgers original post:

"Dear Apple: where are you?"

I think I've just solved this issue on my MPB last night. Read somewhere to try and change my wireless security setting on the router to something other than WPA. I did change it to WEP (128-bit ASCII) and haven't had a drop in connection yet. Previously I was dropping connection every 5 to 10 minutes.

My wireless connection is quite a bit faster as well - give it a shot - worked for me.

Hello everybody. Here's what worked for me.
Three days ago I took apart my MacBook Pro to have physical access to the airport card. As I wrote in another post, I found out that the card was really hot, I would say overheating. A piece of ice on it (under the keyboard) gave back the connection after 20 seconds. Remove the ice and wait 20 seconds: no connection anymore. I suppose 20 seconds is the time needed to change the temperature. Blowing on the card had the same effect but in more than 20 seconds of course.
It appeared clear to me that the airport card was faulty, unless the heating depended on something going wrong on the motherboard. So I ordered a new airport card (802.11 n enabled) and everything goes well since I installed it.
I hope my experience will help you fixing the problem.
Have a good day!
AF

Hi Everyone,

Like so many here and elsewhere, my lovely new MBP is driving me mad with wireless problems, particularly after waking up from sleep. Sometimes (but not always) disabling and then reenabling the Airport interface cures the problem.

Two interesting things I have noticed:-

(1) Just clicking on the Airport icon on the menu bar will instantly restore wireless connectivity (but only for a minute or so). If I have a continuous ping running, as soon as I click on the icon I stop loosing pings.

(2) If I leave iStumbler running it also seems to solve the problem

I'm taking a guess that clicking on the Airport icon issues some system-call to the card which wakes it up. Possibly iStumbler issues the same system call.

I hope this helps someone.

My newest airport issue is that it shows I'm connected to the internet but when I bring up a browser nothing comes up. Same goes for itunes etc. So it says I have a connection when in fact I don't, or at least I can't receive or send and info through the connection. This is just getting old. I'm very seriously contemplating requesting my money back. The problem with airport negates my whole reason for having a portable. If I wanted to have a mac plugged in 24/7 I would have spent half the money and bought an iMac. Seriously Apple, get on this. I expect things like this out of microsoft, but not you. By the way, my problems with wireless happen in XP as well as OSX. It's either a hardware or driver issue.

I am currently having the same problems, how do I do this to fix my own wireless internet problems? Thanks.

When it happens like that, check the quality of your connection to the router doing something like the following from the console:

ping -c 100 [address of the access point]

After 100 pings you will get statistics of the number of packets that have been lost. Getting a very high number there can justify what you describe. Tonight I am getting up to 88% myself!!!

G.

I also had the impression that leaving iStumbler running partly improved the quality of connection, but I have no proof of that, it may just be an impression.

G.

I have tried this. In the same move I switched from WEP to WPA2, removed support to "b" and kept "g" only, and also stopped broadcasting the SSID name. Just after that, everything was fantastic and I believed I solved the issue. The following day it started going wrong again. The following day I had up to 88% of packet loss: back to square one!!!

G.

I'd like to add in a "me too" and state how unimpressed I am with this expensive paperweight I have purchased.

My future relationship with Apple is not looking rosey.

My iBook out performs this sad excuse for a premium product when it comes to network ability.

Also, any ideas on where all my hard disk space went? I used the migration tool and got 20 gig of stuff from my iMac but for some reason, this has consumed over 120 gig of hard drive space.

Any ideas?

Hello All,

I have been fighting the wireless connection issues with my MacBook Pro for months. I have most of the symptoms listed by others, no recognition of wireless network after sleep being the most prevalent, but the dreaded dropouts and reconnects have been happening more and more. I tried a lot of things myself, and have been to the Apple Store twice already, but to no avail. And no, no one from Apple has admitted a MBP and wireless problem to me-ever. I was putting up with it, as I am the only one having problems in our network. Yes, I have problems at home, too, and the other Macs iMacs and Macbooks and even old iBooks connect with no problem to both networks. The one at home is all Apple and the network at work is 3Com. I have experienced it at numerous other sites as well. The reason I am writing here, now, is that my Father's MBP, which had been working fine on the networks, has now started exhibiting the same behavior.

I work with a lot of Macs at work and at home, as well as PC's and none of the other machines have this problem-NONE. It is starting to drive me crazy. I am writing this on a MacBook right now because I know I will not have trouble getting on the network to send this. I know quite well, I am not being very specific here, and I am not looking for someone to solve my problem from this post. I am simply throwing my hat into the ring after trying everything I know to fix this. I have gone through numerous updates hoping that it will be the one that fixes this issue.

Reading ALL of the posts here, I suspect this is related to the unique set of issues found in a MBP with the variables being heat, metal housing and OSX. My MBP has been running the fans more since the last update (10.5.4 for me) and the other MBP has had the runaway heat problems that has been documented in the early MBP's.

I hope Apple is listening and reading and working hard on this, because as much as I love my Apple's this is really frustrating and becoming costly as I waste time just trying to connect to a wireless network!

Regards,

Greg Nelson

Hi pneumat,
I am sorry to see you are joining the club.

Do you have any ideas of why MBPs that have never showed the issue, as your Father's, could suddenly start? My riddle is understanding if the actual problem is hardware or software. In the first case, it's really bad news because Apple is not showing any kind of concern about it. In the second case, I could have some hope that with 10.5.6 or Snow Leopard (10.6), next June, something would change...

When you write that you have been to the Apple Store, "no avail" means that you could not talk to anyone from support? Did you try booking the replacement of the Airport card? I cannot convince myself that going that route is worth it, after reading of other people's experience.

G.

Hi Folks,

I think I may finally have a happy ending.

Some above suggested disabling IPv6 on the wireless card, which I did a few days ago. My wireless access has been perfect ever since: it reconnects after waking from sleep without dropping any packets and it is faaaaaast in a way it has never been before.

Its early days yet and I'm almost afraid to get my hopes up, but my MBP wireless is working better than it has ever done ever since making this change.

If all is still good in a couple of days I will try turning IPv6 back on to see if it breaks again and I will report back.

Has anyone else tried this with any success ?