Q: Dropping Wi FI Signal

This is an obvious snow leopard issue. The only fix I can see is Apple fixing it or everyone running out to buy the Airport Extreme (however some people say this still doesn't solve the issue) I will be phoning apple on Monday hope they have clear answers since I have tried about 1,000 different things. I'm this close to just downgrading back to leopard until this is resolved.

The only thing I think that somewhat fixes it is to change your wireless channel from 6 to 1 or 11 and change your wireless setting to B-ONLY.

I ain't no technician, but I'm 100% certain that this has nothing to do with the Airport Extreme nor any other router for that matter – if you got it to work by playing with these then you got lucky and I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't last. Something under the hood has clearly changed with Snow Leopard that is causing problems on both wireless and wired networks. I'm on a network with 10 other machines running a variety of Tiger and Leopard. Mine is the only one on Snow Leopard, installed two days ago –and the only one having connection problems when tried on both wired and wireless and even just connecting to our local server. Apple need to get this sorted out urgently before I even vaguely consider upgrading the other machines here. As it is, I'm thinking about downgrading my machine – which will REALLY **** me off.

In reply to Hamble, the router (or at least the router configuration) does seem to be a factor. What appears to be the case is that the way Snow Leopard accesses a wireless network (which is different from previous versions of OS X) causes problems with some routers. In my case, my SL MBP runs fine on the wireless net in my office but not on the wireless net at home.

I am currently working with an Apple technician trying to find out exactly what the problem is. Unfortunately (for him, though not for me), selecting a wireless channel well away from any other channels used by neighboring networks that I pick up has reduced my problem to being very infrequent, so it is hard to do data captures for him to examine. (Interference was one issue for me, and that may be a major factor in your case, given the number of other machines on your network, but the underlying problem is indeed that SL is doing something that, under certain conditions, can make it the weakling on the block.)

done. i think everyone who has posted to this thread should hit them up. hopefully if enough people complain about it, they will do something about it.

It continued working but lost a ton of packets switching channels. I just decided to resort back to Leopard until this issue is resolved.

I wanted to update you on the problems I had been having. I got a new MBPro for Christmas with SL pre-installed. Maintaining the connection on our six month old Netgear Dual band router was ridiculous to say the least. The only connection I would get would only allow me to read about one e-mail or a few of these posts before dropping completely and requiring me to reconnect exclusively through the diagnostics section of Network under System Preferences...EVERY 2-5 minutes. I did almost everything mentioned on this thread and a few other sites to try to fix the problem myself with the one main exception of changing configuration of the router or changing the router completely because it was working fine with a PC and an older MB with Tiger. So here is what happened...

We went out of town and stayed 5 nights in a hotel which had wireless and wired internet access. The whole time we were there I lost signal on wireless ONCE. Did NOT have to go through diagnostics to reconnect and kept on trucking. This included after allowing the computer to go to sleep, restarting it, closing/opening the lid, etc. I had read of incompatibility issues with non-Apple routers so I convinced hubby to make a business purchase of an Airport Extreme dual band wireless router for our home office. Set it up once we arrived home one week ago today and am having absolutely NO problems. (knock~on~wood) I had to fiddle with the settings to get the PC to connect but here is what I ended up with:

Radio Mode: 802.11a/n - 802.11b/g
Radio Channel Selection: Manual 149 (5GHz), 1 (2.4 GHz)
Wireless Security: WPA/WPA2 Personal

My suggestion, as simple as it may sound, is to take your MBP to a place that has a strong wireless internet access. If it connects fine say at work or an Apple store then maybe it is a compatibility issue with the router. I'm not saying it isn't a defect within SL itself because in theory you should be able to use any WiFi...that is the whole purpose of the portability of a "book" computer and the internet.

As far as Apple not caring or reading these forums, I think they do. I was contacted via e-mail without contacting them or going through Apple Care so it had to be because of my previous postings. I received the e-mail while out of town so I couldn't perform the system reports the person was requesting...and now the problem (so far) is fixed.

I know this may not help everyone, but hopefully it will help someone.

I recently upgraded my router to a Belkin N+ for wireless use with my MBP running SL. The rest of my configuration: 1 wired Win XP laptop, 1 wireless HP printer, and 1 Airport Express (old model) for iTunes speakers; security was WPA2. I got WiFi drops on the MBP about every 10 minutes. Also the Airport Express became unreachable, even though the light on it remained bright and steady green. To reconnect, I turned off Airport on the MBP, waited 30 seconds, then turned back on. The Airport Express required complete reset/reinitialization each time. After 2 weeks of trying everything I could find suggested on this forum, I reverted back to my prior router, an ancient D-Link DI-524 using WEP. Slower connection, but problem went away, no drops in over a week! I'll continue to monitor this forum for signs of a fix from Apple before trying my next router upgrade!

In response to Glen Hovde:

One thing that you mentioned was that with the 'New' router you were using WPA2 and the old router was using WEP, a much older, simpler security option that is not now recommended. I have found improvements in reliability using WPA rather that WPA2. Did you try using your 'New' router with WPA?

Hey check this thread out, I just posted on there how uninstalling Peer Guardian got mine to work: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2132139&tstart=0

Wanted to share my experience. In short I believe in the argument that it is an interference issue with SL being more susceptible to this than other previous OS releases. I had very few problems on 10.5.6, but upgraded to SL to sync my iphone with a MS exchange work account, well worth it.

First week in SL was hellish, with network dropping continuously.

First improvement was the apple airport upgrade I guess.
The second was a channel change on the router (from 10 to 11).
Third was switching off IPv6.
Then following a conversation with an Apple Genius I instituted several changes in succession (a) assigning manual static IP addresses to my iPhone, MPB and an XP PC through the router so they d not conflict, or go looking for the same addresses, they seem to have an affinity for the .60-65 range, (b) removing unused networks from the list of networks (c) moving airport to the top of the list in network prefs, and/or disabling modalities I do not use, e.g. USB modem ...etc (d) scanning neighbouring network frequencies and changing the channel again so as to be a bit further away from them. Initially I was on 10, I moved to 11 but interrogating the neighbouring networks with system prefs tool discovered that there are a few others on 11, 10 & 1, so I moved to 12, but settled on 3 in the end.

It has not dropped once for over 24 hours now, fingers crossed. I have to admit that none of these changes separately has a lot of impact, but in unison has stabilised the system.

BOTTOM LINE IS THAT WE SHOULD NOT HAVE TO JUMP THROUGH HOOPS TO GET THIS TO WORK. It should just work like EVERY OTHER computer does.

As far as I am concerned this is my first and last MAC, total garbage. I went from PC to MAC for the simplicity of it and now I am getting the opposite.

Bad luck. I had a **** of a time trying to keep my Windows PC stably connected, while my two Macs (both with Snow Leopard) work like a charm.

The difficulty seems to be limited to a few particular routers with particular configurations. Maybe some people with this problem could swap routers with a friend who doesn't use a Mac?

Hi,

I am affected too. I have a MacBook. Since I upgraded to Snow Leopard, the MacBook does not connect to the Wifi at home. The XP and Vista laptops of my children work. I have just reported this to Apple via the feeback link.

My Wifi connection does not drop. I get an IP address but I cannot ping any hosts outside of my network (maybe inside too).

I noticed these messages in /var/log/system.log

Jan 23 16:20:53 antoine-levy-lamberts-macbook ntpd[26]: bind() fd 25, family 30, port 123, scope 5, addr fe80::223:6cff:fe90:1f6e, in6is_addrmulticast=0 flags=0x11 fails: Can't assign requested address
Jan 23 16:20:53 antoine-levy-lamberts-macbook ntpd[26]: unable to create socket on en1 (10) for fe80::223:6cff:fe90:1f6e#123


Regards,

Antoine

Additional Specs on my Macbook Pro:

4 GB 1067 MHz DDR#
OS 10.6.2

have AT&T U-Verse at home, been running a wireless network seamlessly with every other laptop, similar to other people's experience on this forum

here's what happens:

• will be working normally -- normal web surfing -- and all of a sudden the wireless icon will search for a network, i'll lose connectivity for a few seconds, then it finds my home network, and reloads the page

this of course, "shouldn't happen," and doesn't with any other laptop

so far, i've selected a new channel per the advice on this forum, but apparently [as per this post] that didn't work
tried channel 8 and 7, but don't really care to try others unless people know that that is an actual solution

the droppage occurred sometime at 4:47pm (for those looking into the log below)
i copied the console messages if anyone is able to glean any meaning from it.

["Davy Grey" is the name of my home network...]

1/23/10 4:47:01 PM GoBoingo[106] WiFiCardAdapterImp::GetCurrentConnectionInfo done: 0
1/23/10 4:47:08 PM GoBoingo[106] WiFiCardAdapterImp::GetCurrentConnectionInfo
1/23/10 4:47:08 PM GoBoingo[106] Monitor64::haveCoreWLAN true
1/23/10 4:47:08 PM GoBoingo[106] Monitor64::isPoweredOnCoreWLAN
1/23/10 4:47:08 PM GoBoingo[106] Monitor64::getCurrentConnectionInfoCoreWLAN
1/23/10 4:47:08 PM GoBoingo[106] Got SSID: Davy Grey
1/23/10 4:47:08 PM GoBoingo[106] Name: Davy Grey, bssid: 00:24:56:a4:97:d9, rssi: 47
1/23/10 4:47:08 PM GoBoingo[106] WiFiCardAdapterImp::GetCurrentConnectionInfo getting IP info
1/23/10 4:47:08 PM GoBoingo[106] WiFiCardAdapterImp::GetCurrentConnectionInfo done: 1
1/23/10 4:47:08 PM GoBoingo[106] Monitor64::haveCoreWLAN true
1/23/10 4:47:08 PM GoBoingo[106] Monitor64::WriteScanListCoreWLAN
1/23/10 4:47:13 PM GoBoingo[106] Monitor64::WriteScanListCoreWLAN done with 13 networks
1/23/10 4:47:13 PM GoBoingo[106] WiFiCardAdapterImp::GetCurrentConnectionInfo
1/23/10 4:47:13 PM GoBoingo[106] Monitor64::haveCoreWLAN true
1/23/10 4:47:13 PM GoBoingo[106] Monitor64::isPoweredOnCoreWLAN
1/23/10 4:47:13 PM GoBoingo[106] Monitor64::getCurrentConnectionInfoCoreWLAN
1/23/10 4:47:13 PM GoBoingo[106] Got SSID: Davy Grey
1/23/10 4:47:13 PM GoBoingo[106] Name: Davy Grey, bssid: 00:24:56:a4:97:d9, rssi: 46
1/23/10 4:47:13 PM GoBoingo[106] WiFiCardAdapterImp::GetCurrentConnectionInfo getting IP info
1/23/10 4:47:13 PM GoBoingo[106] WiFiCardAdapterImp::GetCurrentConnectionInfo done: 1
1/23/10 4:47:15 PM GoBoingo[106] Controller::CheckSoftwareUpdate
1/23/10 4:48:15 PM GoBoingo[106] Controller::CheckSoftwareUpdate
1/23/10 4:49:15 PM GoBoingo[106] Controller::CheckSoftwareUpdate

lil help?