Q: Dropping Wi FI Signal

I have had this issue since last year. The dropping of the wifi signal has now been resolved. Well the problem has not manifested itself since Sunday. What did I do I hear you say.

My set up consists of an ADSL Modem then into an Airport Extreme unit. I have changed the modem to one made by Billion 5200s. The swap over was simple and resolved the issue.

What is the route cause of this problem it is OSX 10.6 and Apple must have done something which does not allow older modems to work.

I have a latest generation fritz box modem and 10.6.4 does not work with that reliably.

The only cure I have found is to fix the channel number to mid band.

If it goes to either end I get drop outs.

Did something similar.
Replaced my 2Wire 2705 with an Actiontec GT701D.
I run the ADSL modem in transparent bridge mode and let the AEBS do all of the routing.
ZERO dropouts since the swap.
I agree it is a 10.6 issue since my wife and son use separate Powerbooks running 10.4.11 and didn't have any problems connecting.
The change to the Actiontec modem from the 2Wire (ATT isp) has also given a speed boost. I read somewhere that the 2Wire units were having trouble with the packets due to some upgrades ATT had made.

Lets see if we can push this to 100 pages. Maybe Apple will take notice. Bought new MacPro with 10.5 last year, noticed drop-outs every few hours but assumed it was interference and just suffered through. Then I started to notice it did not happen on my crappy Win7 Acer laptop, WinXP franken-puter or old MDD Pro running 10.4 (even though they are 40 ft away). I waited until 10.6.3 came out before upgrading hoping the hype would prove tru re: wifi stability. Installed last night. Drops every 20 seconds. Tried deleting wifi profiles, playing with security settings and IP settings... no effect. router is a 2 yr old Dlink DIR625, which is not newest or best, but pretty darned common in the marketplace.

Will try some of the other fixes on here, but not holding much hope. Thanks to everyone trying to give support; I think this a testament to Apple users desire to help their peers... even if Apple doesn't give two sh*ts. This computer has turned out to be like a Ferrari that they forgot to a transmission into; at least I paid for the priveledge of getting screwed.

I have two separate macs (2010 Macbook, 2009 iMac) and after upgrading them to Snow Leopard the wireless connection is unusable. Is anything being done to correct the issues with the software that are causing the issues with wireless?

Just to add my 2c to this monster thread:

- Netgear DSL modem DG814, firmware V4.10 Feb. 11, 2004
- Linksys WRT54GL running dd-wrt firmware: DD-WRT v24-sp2 (10/10/09) std
- 2009 MacBook Pro running 10.6.4

I'm not getting dropped connections but since upgrading to 10.6.4 my MacBook issues constant streams of DNS lookups which slows everyone on my wifi down to a crawl... presumably because my Mac is spamming my ISPs DNS servers - the lookup is 'Standard Query SOA local' - several a second, non-stop.

Things I've tried:
- I thought it was the new DNS prefetching in Safari 5, so switched to Chrome. I thought this fixed it for a while, but no, it's independent of what browser I'm using, and I turned off the DNS prefetching in Chrome too.
- upgraded firmware in my DSL modem and wifi router - no change. Tried dd-wrt on my DG54G - no change
- changed various different DNS providers - my ISPs default servers, Google DNS, OpenDNS etc

Things that had some effect:
- setting my MTU size to 1400 seems to have made the response time browsing websites a lot more responsive, but hasn't solved the eventual slowdowns from the DNS lookups that come and go

Things that stop the DNS look ups for several minutes:
- stoping and restarting Airport
- deleting and recreating Airport in Network preferences

An update on my several posts. I just realized that when I connect to the Internet on my mac and it throws me off, it also throws a pc laptop on the same network off. When I am not on the Internet everything is fine with the other laptop.

Just thought that was interesting.

There is nothing a Mac can do to "throw" other systems off the network, so if you're seeing that happen, it's your router or cablel/DSL modem at fault.

What's with you William.

You always seen to be saying that Macs are perfect and that all problems are therefore problems with something else. Having spent over 20 years in the field of troubleshooting computers and networks, I can tell you something that may come as a surprise, Macs are NOT perfect. They may be generally more reliable than PCs but they do sometimes have problems.

Why is it that you can't admit that there is a problem? Who is paying you for your postings???

Well, why is it that I was never kicked off with OS 10.5 and when I stopped using my mac, the PC user was not kicked off once but when I logged back on, both computers were kicked off? There is something to do with the Mac. It may be the Mac AND the router but the Mac is definitely involved.

Maybe we are holding our computers the wrong way. Is there a case we can get?

PCServices.info wrote:
What's with you William.

You always seen to be saying that Macs are perfect and that all problems are therefore problems with something else. Having spent over 20 years in the field of troubleshooting computers and networks, I can tell you something that may come as a surprise, Macs are NOT perfect. They may be generally more reliable than PCs but they do sometimes have problems.

Why is it that you can't admit that there is a problem? Who is paying you for your postings???

Well in his defense as a Network Engineer I can tell you that it is NOT and 10.6.4 problem.

William knows most Mac users don't have any problems. The problem is IMHO Apple has made the wireless setup to easy and most home users( including Mac users) have zero knowledge how networking & wireless actually works.

So this many people are having the same problem because they are unintelligent? I'm not buying it. No offense.

I've been following this, the wi-fi issues threads around the iPhone 3G, the 3GS, the iPhone4 and the iPad. The problems remain consistent across the board.

The short version: William Kucharski in this thread is mostly correct.

The longer version, starting with a story. Years ago, I built a Windows XP-based PC around an ASUS P5AD2E Premium motherboard, one that included the first of a number of generations of Realtek wifi cards built-in (I've since built further PCs using the P5B series, which also used the Realtek cards). This was all in the days before WPA2.

LOTS of mysteries regarding how to get any of those wi-fi AP stations configured so even my 802.11b Sony PSP portables could hook up to them. In one case, literally, every time I rebooted one of the computers, I had to go in and re-enter all the protocol and password info in the wifi control software, to "refresh" it so that my PSPs (and later, Nintendo DSes) could see it. And this was all before 802.11g. If I didn't do that... lo and behold, these devices could not connect.

And here we are, approximately five years later, with WPA2, WPA2 Personal, WPA2 Enterprise, 802.11b/g/n, 802.11n+, etc. etc. etc. And people are going crazy with multiple devices in multiple places trying to get wireless to work.

The reality is, and this has been true since the days I started back on a CP/M machine with a 300 baud modem (Apples were too expensive for me back then, I was a starving grad student), any area of technology that is undergoing rapid change is going to be fraught with risks, bugs, incompatibilities and mysteries.

I recall at one point in my life managing to end up on the phone with one of the engineers in Malaysia or somewhere over a CMD IDE controller chip that wouldn't let me configure a system with one IDE hard drive on port1 and a separate SCSI drive without an IDE hard drive on port2 (turned out to be a very mysterious and rare bug in the CMD chip on my motherboard). That was at the time hard storage was evolving rapidly, and SCSI was going to be the future for all of us, and IDE was the poor man's hard drive. <g>

Point is basically, that the same simple principles of project management apply here: good, fast, cheap. Pick two. You don't get all three. You want good, and fast, it ain't gonna be cheap. You want good and cheap, it ain't gonna be fast. You want fast and cheap, it ain't gonna be good.

With regard to wireless tech, which is our current cutting-edge headache, you're not going to get a stable network (cheap, good) if you're trying to use older, indeterminate hardware (of which even, say, AT&T's 2Wire ADSL modems, which they sell for anyone with an AT&T ISP probably to this day, is a current example). If you want a stable, fast network (good, fast), it's not going to be cheap. You're going to have to try multiple combinations, and mate up whatever router you can find that works with your latest Apple Thing, and doing so may knock your Older Apple Thing or your other Network Things (in my case, my Sony PSP, for example) out of the picture. Or you may stick with what works, and buy a New Apple Thing, and find that it's incompatible with some quirk of your older network hardware, even though Apple's rigorously stuck to the latest standards across the board and tested thoroughly against same in their release.

The main thing will always be true with tech: the areas where things are moving fastest, are not going to be good (read stable, "it just works") or cheap (I just buy whatever's to hand and it just works). If you're pursuing the cutting edge, you're going to get cut. At the point where the tech has stabilized around standards that don't change for awhile (read 2 years) and manufacturers can all manufacture reliably and compatibly to those standards, you won't have problems; it'll be a mass market tech that "just works."

Wireless networking, especially for faster network needs, like video unbuffered streaming at full HD on a good-sized screen, for example, simply isn't there yet.

Wireless networking with hundreds of people living in close proximity each with their own access point and configuration and radio broadcasting system, basically, say in an apartment in NYC, is going to be difficult.

Keep working at it, understand the complexities, don't finger point, and give it time. It's amazing any of it's working at all.

Message was edited by: realtrance

I bought my macbook pro 2 months ago, already did update to 10.6.4 but I still have the same problem. My router is a linksys WRT54G2 the latest firmware.
Where are the apple to fix this?
Just to add: I have a macbook 13 (white) with 10.6.4 and another notebook with Windows 7, both without problems.

Message was edited by: rod.gui

Has anyone ever tried their machine on the same wireless network...but using Boot Camp? I have and noticed that I do not get dropped from a wireless network when using Windows 7 x64 on my MacBook.

Another thing I noticed is that the wifi drop usually occurs when I'm idle with the connection. How is it that I'm able to download a huge file without an interruption, but when simply reading news articles and blogs, I will get dropped.

I'm wondering if there is some kind of power setting where AirPort is set to conserve power during times of inactivity.