Q: Dropping Wi FI Signal

People on a similar thread are also saying changing to WPA solved it for them too:

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10554152#10554152

FYI, i just updated system to 10.6.2. the problem still exists. dropping signal every 15mins. has anyone upgraded to 10.6.2 and everything gone back to normal?

I had lots of drops using WPA2, and just last night changed back to WPA (plain). Time will tell if it's fixed. At one point my computer was not passing traffic out, and I did a quick start of the Airport software to get going again. However, I never did get the incessant network scanning as previously happened with WPA2.

If a new router will solve this issue, I'd be interested in knowing which model people have had luck with. My airport card is one of the Atheros models.

Here is a post I made a few weeks back, re-posting to help others....

There are a few threads on the discussion boards and one suggested the wireless tolerances changed in SL (10.6) & Leopard (10.5.8). I've made changed to my Juniper FW and all is good, no more connection time outs/wireless drops. The default settings used to work fine, but these tweaks along with deleting the network setting wireless profile has my wife happy on her ibook. The changes to wireless in particular were...
snip
Change the Beacon Interval to 75,
Change the Fragmentation Threshold to 2304,
Change the RTS Threshold to 2304
then "Save Settings"...
end of snip

I hope these help others

smickd - in my case, I switched from a Linksys WRT54GL to a D-Link DI-825. It was the only solution I could think of considering I had two different MacBooks (both running SL) and only one was able to maintain a reliable connection. The other one had no problems at all when it was running Leopard.

As I mentioned before, everything is fine for me with the new router but I still check this thread out daily because the problem is just so bizarre.

Apologies if you took that personally, todhop, but as radlure points out far more eloquently than myself, there IS a problem with Snow Leopard's wireless networking and it's been several months of what is pretty much a mission critical bug and it's flat out insulting when we're told that all is well and we must be doing something wrong.

When you say your wireless drops, do you mean the AirPort Menu Extra bars all
grey out ? Or do you mean your connection to the internet is simply very slow.

Hold the Option key when you click on the AirPort Icon and paste the details here so someone here can help you out.


Here's a quick troubleshooting tip for you guys:

-Try this: Open 2 Terminal Windows and ping your router (eg. ping 192.168.1.1 )in one window and ping an external website (eg. ping www.google.com) in the other one. If you notice the pings to your router going strong but pings to the external website experiencing losses/drops, the issue is mostly with your wireless router and not the Mac.

Just a few troubleshooting tips that have helped me in the past.

j0390 wrote:
Were you also getting the message "kernel AirPort: Link Down on en1. Reason 4 (Disassociated due to inactivity)." even though you were in every way active? That's what I was getting and switching channels and/or WEP to WPA is working great for me still (been online all day, not a single disconnect). I have other Macs on the network, all on the same setup and none of them were having the same problem.

No the connection loss as I saw it was stealth-no error message. Frequently when attempting to reconnect I would get "connection timed out" Sometimes airport would fail to find the network at all even though it was there and working for other computers. The home network I'm referring to fortunately doesn't have interference/other channels in it's vicinity. Hope that helps somehow.

Maybe someone within radio range has turned on a set of wireless speakers or cordless phone, or set up a new base station on the same channel, or something.

Wifi has been rock solid between my Mac Mini and the Airport Extreme in 10.5 and 10.6. I think after I installed 10.6 I had to re-select the network.

i'm on 10.6.2 now, it seems like the dropping signal is fixed. but i dont know if because i phoned the internet provider to restrain my signal to reduce interference or b/c of this update b/c it happened in the same day.

i'm on 10.6.2 now, it seems like the dropping signal is fixed. but i dont know if because i phoned the internet provider to restrain my signal to reduce interference or b/c of this update b/c it happened in the same day.

ok nevermind, just got disconnected!!!! and its the school network, its suppposed to be very stable !! argh

Updating to 10.6.2 didn't fix this wireless connection problem, nor any other fixes provided in the thread....

Updated to 10.6.2, but my MBP will still only stay continuously connected to the wireless router if it's in 802.11b only mode.

wifiguru,

The Airport, in the Menu Extra Bars DOES grey out, and completely forgets about staying connected. It literally decides to pretend that the very signal it was on, is no longer there, and so the net connection just goes out - for no apparent reason at all.

It is NOT the DNS, it is not the Router, it's not the Pinging. Literally, the MBP's Airport decides to DROP the reception. But, when you go to the Menu Bar and look at the list of the signals, it's still there, but it's at the bottom of the list, so I click on it, it asks for the system password to reconnect, and it reconnects, and the signal bars indicate that I am connected, and it is.

But this out-of-the-blue drop of signal is the mystery that I, and many others, are talking about.

But, I will try the WPA thing - I've always been on WPA2, however.

Message was edited by: 24Golfer

Same here. No error messages, just a freaky drop of signal reception. As I have also mentioned before, my PC, which is hooked up without Wi-Fi, has no trouble at all on its direct Ethernet wire connection.