The problem's Wifi congestion - really!
Some of you will have seen my various sarcastic posts regarding Apple wireless networking. I have, on several occasions, suggested that the problem is channel congestion, only for others to dismiss this.
For the last couple of weeks, I've been working away from home and I brought my Mac Book along 'cos I trust it better for internet commerce - fewer viruses and trojans than a PC...
In two different hotels, it connected in seconds and stayed up solid as a rock for hours. This is the Mac Book that has trouble staying connected for ten minutes at home. The difference? At home, the wifi scanner commonly shows between ten and fifteen strong wifi base stations. Here, in a rural hotel, it can only see one.
I'm convinced it's congestion (and, possibly, other forms of interference). That fully explains the symptoms that I see with variable reliability as neighbours turn their access points off during the week while they're out. It also explains why, for many people, there simply isn't a problem and why others who used to work fine now find that their connections are becoming unreliable.
It's not a problem across the board - my wife has an elderly, 802.11b only Mac Book which works fine and my son's brand new Mac also seems ok - but my two year old Mac Book is appalingly unreliable in a congested metropolitan environment while being 100% solid in a low radio interference rural environment.
I'm also convinced that it's a software stack issue. Running network monitoring on a WinTel PC at home shows that the network connection is also dropping quite frequently, but it silently recovers within a second or two so that the only symptom is an occasional drop in throughput. The Apple Wifi stack on 802.11n Macbooks around two years old simply seems unable to recover from interference bursts and other network congestion...
Martin
For the last couple of weeks, I've been working away from home and I brought my Mac Book along 'cos I trust it better for internet commerce - fewer viruses and trojans than a PC...
In two different hotels, it connected in seconds and stayed up solid as a rock for hours. This is the Mac Book that has trouble staying connected for ten minutes at home. The difference? At home, the wifi scanner commonly shows between ten and fifteen strong wifi base stations. Here, in a rural hotel, it can only see one.
I'm convinced it's congestion (and, possibly, other forms of interference). That fully explains the symptoms that I see with variable reliability as neighbours turn their access points off during the week while they're out. It also explains why, for many people, there simply isn't a problem and why others who used to work fine now find that their connections are becoming unreliable.
It's not a problem across the board - my wife has an elderly, 802.11b only Mac Book which works fine and my son's brand new Mac also seems ok - but my two year old Mac Book is appalingly unreliable in a congested metropolitan environment while being 100% solid in a low radio interference rural environment.
I'm also convinced that it's a software stack issue. Running network monitoring on a WinTel PC at home shows that the network connection is also dropping quite frequently, but it silently recovers within a second or two so that the only symptom is an occasional drop in throughput. The Apple Wifi stack on 802.11n Macbooks around two years old simply seems unable to recover from interference bursts and other network congestion...
Martin
MacBook, Mac Mini, Vaious PCs, Mac OS X (10.4.10)
