Airport Express as WDS Remote loses Internet Connection after a few hours

I have the exact same problem!

I thought that maybe it was the way I set things up, but I double and triple-checked my steps and nothing is the matter. I have a new Airport Extreme and I just bought a new Express so I could play Airtunes through my stereo.

In Airport Utility, if I can see only the Extreme, I can connect to the Internet, but not Airtunes. If I can see the Express, I get Airtunes but no Internet connection.

I've tried soft and hard resets of both devices and the outcome is the same...4-5 hours (maybe) of uninterrupted bliss, then nothing. I've tried moving the Express around the house, to see if it was interference with the chimney, but no dice.

I wish I had more answers for you, but I'm just as stuck as you are.

Anyone?

I have the Exact same problem also... I have Cox Broadband Internet... Connected to an airport extreme ... and I have an Express used as a repeater... after a couple hours i have to restart everything... to get the net to work... before I do that... I only see the express in my network preferences.

I'm afraid it's a common problem and nobody seems to know how to fix it - Apple included.

You will find many suggestions for the cause and solution here, but none of them really seem to hold water. I'm convinced that it is just one symptom of a generic problem with 802.11 protocols in a congested environment. You will find many example posts on this forum with people reporting that their Airport, which has worked perfectly for months (or even years) has suddenly started disconnecting or misbehaving in some other way - they suspect hardware failure or the effects of some faulty software or firmware upgrade and either swap out the Airport or roll back the most recent software changes. Typically they report that whatever they did has fixed the problem, only to write back a week or so later to say that it has reappeared.

You will find people criticising Apple for releasing faulty hardware or software and advocating throwing the entire Airport network in the bin and switching to Netgear or some other manufacturer. I switched to Airport from Netgear following problems with their products - I don't think any are much better or much worse.

As an experiment a week or so ago, following a cascade of network disconnects on my Airport Extreme/MacBook combination, I switched back to the Netgear access point and got out my Sony Vaio laptop running Windows XP - not a single Apple component switched on. I ran it for over a day, watching the network status carefully. At all times, the status display showed 100% signal strength, but the network speed oscillated between 54MBps all the way down to 1MBps and back again. Sometimes it didn't stop at 1Mbps - it dropped out completely for a second or so, popping up a notification message that "Network ABWIRELESS is now connected".

Now, I live in a city environment with a lot of other wireless networks in range - the WiFi sniffer never shows less than six other networks and I've often got ten networks visible at close to 100% signal strength. And the more strong signals I can see, the more frequent are the network dropouts. The guidelines for selecting a wifi channel are to choose one which is at least three away from any strong neighbour - but there are only around a dozen channels available (depending on what country you are in) - do the sums - more than three strong neighbours and you can't follow the guidelines. The problem is just network congestion - everyone is going wireless and as soon as more than three or four of your neighbours come up with strong signals, you are heading for trouble. That is why people who have been running smoothly for ages suddenly hit problems and why they seem to come and go - monitoring with my sniffer, the number of visible networks goes up and down - people switch the access points off while they are out of the house - at the moment it is showing twelve other base stations with signal strengths over 26% - earlier this afternoon there were only five.

My experience is that the Airport Extreme is as good as most other access points as a simple access point and better than some (the Belkin was driving me nuts). When it comes to the advanced features like WDS, Airtunes and disk sharing, I do think it is very poor at recovering from network glitches. Apple could usefully put some effort into improving its resilience in that respect.

Martin Bradford

As I said in my original post, it's very easy to not notice the problems if you are using the Airport as a simple wireless access point - the connection drops momentarily, the re-establishes itself for me. And the Apple network stack doesn't report momentary disconnects in the way that the Windows stack does - when I am using my windows laptop, I am getting the "Network connected" bubble pop up several times per hour - in most cases I am barely aware of the hiccup. I find that I only really notice it when I am connected into one of my Unix servers using an X-Term on my laptop - even a momentary disconnect then forces a logout from the unix machine! I have exactly the same problems with a totally non-Apple networking solution - Netgear access point and Windows XP on various different laptops. Actually, the Airport seems rather better than the other access points.

I am convinced that this is an almost endemic problem on airports and other wifi access points - do a Google search for "wifi dropout" - it produces over 20,000 hits and the majority of them are from postings relating to systems with no Apple components present at all. For most people, it is an irritation which just reduces throughput, it's only for certain applications - like my X-Terminal into Unix that it is a real killer. And, I think, it is a killer for Apple's WDS and AirTunes applications. They just need to put in the effort to make them recover gracefully from wifi hiccups! I don't use my Airport as a router, but the experiences of others seem to indicate that it is also particularly vulnerable to wifi dropouts in that mode...

Martin

P.S. see http://www.aximsite.com/boards/x30-x3-x3i-forums/29462-x3i-wifi-drop-out-after-3 0-45-minutes.html - not an Apple in sight! Wifi simply is not up to the levels of congestion and interference in an urban environment these days, I'm afraid

Message was edited by: Martin Bradford

Please look at the forum "Airport Express Mysteriously Disconnects and Requires a Restart." I think you'll find a lot of people who are experiencing a similar issue.