Q: Dropping Wi FI Signal

A couple observations:

I have been using AirRadar to watch what the Airport "sees" for the last few days. My router is a new dual band Time Capsule so the are four networks. The Primary and Guest at both 2.4 GHz and 5.7 GHz. All four of these will randomly drop to zero signal. Sometimes they will come back within a few seconds and sometimes stay zero much longer and the Airport then removes them from the available network list. They will come back after a few to several minutes. The 2.4 GHZ connections are far more stable than the 5.7 GHz. The 5.7 goes to zero many times an hour while the 2.4 usually, but not always, will hold a signal for one or more hours.

I think there is more to this than the Airport just dropping the network. I have also noticed that occasionally when I do have a connection the airport does not seem to be passing a page request to the router, or if it is, it is not hearing the return data. A page may not load at all or I might get just part of the page then it stops. All this while the Airport is showing a strong connected signal. At first I assumed it was an ISP problem but it happens to frequently and NEVER happens when I have an Ethernet cable connected. My wife has a ~6 month old unibody MacBook Pro also on 10.6.2 (upgrade) and she does not have the dropping problem but does have the page loading problem. It exhibits it's self as an ISP issue but as I say, it never happens when the Ethernet cable is connected to the Mac. If this and the dropping are related I suspect that there may be a very large number of people that have the issue but just do not realize it.

Hi,

Glad to know I'm not the only one having this dropping wifi problem. Our home setup is like this:
We've got an airport extreme. My wife has the old black mac book. I'm using the first gen. unibody 13". We both have 3GS iPhones. The iPhones get the wifi signal without any problems. My wife's computer as well. It's just my mac book. The dropping wi-fi signal started yesterday, all of a sudden. Weird thing is that I didn't update or change anything on my computer. I tried to connect to the wi-fi of the family living next door, I get a perfect signal and a steady connection (they're not using an apple airport). The wi-fi at work also work perfectly with my MacBook. Could it then be a Airport Extreme problem? It's not an ISP issue: Internet is working perfectly on any computers with the ethernet cable. Again, everything has been working flawlessly for the last few years. We did upgrade to SnowLeopard a couple of month ago, and everything was fine. I really don't get the "all of a sudden" factor and also why only one computer suffers from that. Hopefully we'll nail the problem and fix it. Thanks for all your sharing guys!

Kind regards from Switzerland (hope you understood my english).
Y.

Ok I am experiencing less violent dropouts lately.
After reading a few thing helpful in this tread i narrowwed my problem to a few things that work together to play foul with my wifi.

1) Inactivity
From the router and from the computer.
I mean that if the router did not have any activity recently, my Imac will have problems connecting to the router. Entering the right WEP makes it timeout. So I open my macbook, open a webpage and retry. Boom! I now have access to the router and the nets. So far so good. You leave it idle a few minutes (even seconds) and Re-Boom! Connection not working but still connected to router. Renew dhcp and it's good for a little while.

To counter this I use internet radio and stream constantly thus keeping my connection alive. No drops when streaming.

2) keychain and password
It seems like the wifi keychain doesn't or can't remember the password and/or loses access to it. Ok, I can be way out here but it seems like when it's idle it loses access to router and keychain access plus idles the dhcp requiring a renew.

Anyhow it's my options for now.

For your info:
I migrated my data/applications from my macbook on a clean factory install. Upgraded everything + airport client 2009-02.

Just an update...

I deleted my AirPort preferences and reset my Time Capsule's settings to default. After setting up my wireless network I reserved an IP for my MacBook Pro. Haven't dropped signal since.

I'm not sure if a reserved IP helps with this problem or not, but it's a step I took so I just thought I'd throw it in there.

I have a Mac Book Pro, started to experience allot of dropped signals. I then took out the battery and held the power button for about 10 seconds (that resets the SMC i think?) Since then, my connection has rarely dropped, maybe once in the past 2 days. Anyway, it's allot better.

Before I returned a macmini I purchased for my wife I booted it up in an unbuntu live cd ( to fdisk the drive before returning) and out of curiosity, I fired up the wifi and it worked NO PROBLEMS.

On a more positive note, I was contacted by an apple employee who requested some airportd debug and diag info. So, it does appear as though they are working on this. Frustrating ... Already spent over 100 dollars in returning apple gear that wouldn't connect with wifi and still have one laptop that drops out at the worst times like, updating Quicken.

Does anyone know what are the wireless cards in these systems? Broadcom 43xx ? Someone mentioned somewhere that the newer cards are atheros based? I know people who are running OpenBSD on macbook pro no problems, wifi works. It's pretty sad when another OS drivers can work better than the native ones.

Has anyone else heard from apple viaemail requesting hardware info?

I posted this in another thread before seeing this one, so I'll add my experience here.

Brand new 17" MBP here (as of today). Beautiful machine and my first Mac

Suffering the same wireless disconnects. What's interesting is that my PC laptop which I can run at the same time, does not. More interesting is that my wife's 1 week old 17" MBP seems to disconnect at the same time (+more testing required to confirm this+).

Come on Apple ... we've spent a small fortune on these 2 high end MBPs. This is a BASIC fundamental requirement of a laptop .. stable wireless. What's going on?

Please engage us and ask us to run some tests if this will be useful to you.

James

In response to:

"but when some very rare Macs do this right out of the box, you have to suspect the hardware"

I disagree. If someone can roll back to a different version of the OS, and others can run different OS (eg. Windows / Linux) and not experience disconnects, how can this be a hardware issue?

We have two new 17" MBPs behaving like this. It's not affecting our PC laptops or iPhones. I'll install Windows over the weekend on here and see if I experience the same disconnects then whilst my wife uses hers as a Mac. Should be an interesting test!

Cheers

James

"If someone can roll back to a different version of the OS, and others can run different OS (eg. Windows / Linux) and not experience disconnects, how can this be a hardware issue?"

If one Mac disconnects, and another with exactly the same software installed does not, how can it NOT be a hardware issue? I think that a hardware glitch that only affects Snow Leopard best explains the evidence.

At least that's what I thought until a few minutes ago, when Nutty87th posted about twin MBPs dropping connections. (In sync, no less!) The chances of getting twin hardware glitches are pretty remote. Still, this is a relatively rare phenomenon ... whatever the common thread is, it's pretty damned obsure.

Hi There,
I've posted here before...I have a late 2007 imac and have been having problems with WiFi dropouts since upgrading to Snow Leopard. I wanted to re-post today, as the problem has been particularly bad lately (barely able to stay connected at all...have reverted to copying everything I'm writing hear so I don't lose it) and I was wondering if anyone has found any permanent solution for this major networking issue? Thanks.

I was also contacted requesting additional logs and info.

I was also contacted by Apple, though Ii have gotten things set up now so problems are very occasional so I may not be able to provide timely feedback -- though since the issue does still happen, there is still something going on.

BTW, I too run two cloned MBPs, as an earlier poster reported, a 15 inch and a 17 inch, and the issue arises on both, and began on both right after the SL upgrade. So if there is a hardware component to the problem, it is overwhelmingly likely to be systemic to at least one batch of MBPs, not just a few faulty machines. It could of course be one particular batch of wireless cards, that have some fault that did not cause an issue with Leopard but did manifest with SL! I bought both MBPs at the same time as a single purchase. That's what I would put my money on.

I read a few pages but could find no solution to this.

I am experiencing the same issue.

At first it was only with my old sweex router, very cheap so i just assumed it was the router because my MacBook is less than a year old.

However, yesterday i setup my new Time Capsule and today it disconnected me in the same way as before.

I immediately checked the system.log and it shows the following around the time of the disconnect.

Jan 8 21:24:15 hackbook configd[19]: network configuration changed.
Jan 8 21:24:27 hackbook KernelEventAgent[42]: tid 00000000 received event(s) VQ_NOTRESP (1)
Jan 8 21:24:27 hackbook KernelEventAgent[42]: tid 00000000 type 'afpfs', mounted on '/Volumes/Data-1', from 'afp_0YqI2q1xIrKg00jkPL0Pyetl-1.3300000d', not responding
Jan 8 21:24:27 hackbook KernelEventAgent[42]: tid 00000000 found 1 filesystem(s) with problem(s)
Jan 8 21:24:58 hackbook ntpd[30]: bind() fd 29, family 30, port 123, scope 5, addr fe80::225:ff:fe3f:528, in6is_addrmulticast=0 flags=0x11 fails: Can't assign requested address
Jan 8 21:24:58 hackbook ntpd[30]: unable to create socket on en1 (76) for fe80::225:ff:fe3f:528#123
Jan 8 21:24:58 hackbook configd[19]: network configuration changed.

Why is my network configuration being changed?

I am running OS 10.6 too and it never happened with 10.5.

Darwin hackbook.local 10.2.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.2.0: Tue Nov 3 10:37:10 PST 2009; root:xnu-1486.2.11~1/RELEASE_I386 i386

Message was edited by: swehack

Message was edited by: swehack

Trying hard to edit the post so the pasted log looks better but failing miserably. If it uses wikimarkup, why can't i just indent it with a space?

Message was edited by: swehack

Hi there,
It's working again! Just thought I'd share what I did (while I'm aware this might not
work for everyone). I wanted to launch the Airport Utility to have a look at my settings,
and because I couldn't see the AirPort Extreme Base Station listed, I connected my MacBook
with a RJ45 and the Base Station appeared in the Airport Utility. I changed the name of the
Base Station: name.local -> newname.local and the default channel that used to be
13 has been changed to Automatic instead. And voilà! Hope this helps (a bit).
Yann

We have several macs at the office here(macbooks, mac minis and iMacs) and found that with the latest i5 it was losing connection to one of the wireless routers - whereas others could stay connected fine.

extremely frustrating, but turned out the solution was straight forward. We disabled wireless g & b mode on the router and instead fixed it to wireless g only.

the i5 can now stay connected without any problems - its worth a shot, because its so simple