Airport Extreme Connection Problems
I just got two new aluminum MacBooks that need to be set up for friends of mine. I have an Airport Extreme wireless router at my house (WPA2 / FirmWare 7.3.2 / in '802.11n (802.11b/g compatible)' mode / using MAC address access control / interface robustness 'on'). This setup works well and has been working well for years (I have a 17" MacBook Pro, an older MacBook, a wireless printer, a Wii, etc. and they can all connect fine all the time), but these two new machines have been nothing but trouble.
They will periodically successfully connect to my network (when connected, Network Utility reports a 130Mbit/s connection speed) and everything seems to work fine for a while, but eventually the network (both WAN and LAN) slows to a crawl and stops working altogether (I've been testing this by transferring large files from both my local NAS and the web). The WiFi signal strength indicator in the menu bar remains full when this happens (I am about 7 feet from my router), yet all pings fail once the connection drops. To fix this, I turn AirPort off and on again via. the menu, then try to reconnect when my network finally appears in the list (it doesn't appear every time). This is followed up with several 'connection timeout' errors when I try to re-connect to my network, and eventually, after many attempts, I 'sometimes' gets things connected again (only to have the connection drop again shortly thereafter).
This is weak. Most of the suggestions I've found involve changing settings on the router to try and fix this. But, really, I shouldn't have to change my router to allow these new machines to connect (and because I am setting these up for computer illiterate friends, I can't expect them to know how to modify every router they encounter just so that their new MacBook will connect). Also, because I have two of these machines, and out-of-the-box (before I installed anything), they are both exhibiting the same behavior, I am finding it hard to believe that this is a 'one-off' hardware fault that a quick trip back to the Apple store would fix. I did run software update on the new MacBook's and they are completely (as of today) up to date and I did add the Airport MAC addresses to the access control list on my router. Oh yeah, all of my neighbours routers are on channel 6 (there are 5 signals that I can pick up) and my router is on channel 2.
Any ideas? Anyone else with this problem? Is there anything that I could be missing here? Sigh...
Mike
Aluminum 13" MacBook, Mac OS X (10.5.5)