Q: Dropping Wi FI Signal

Chiming in on the problem. Security as problem is pure rubbish in my case. I connect regularly to two different base stations, and have removed security from both. My MBP has the flakiest connection ever. Weak when only feet from the station, cuts in and out, drops both downloads and uploads, and I am constantly turning the airport card on and off to be able to see the network at all. The base station is about 12 feet from me at the moment. My MBP has an Airport Extreme card with an Atheros chipset. The other THREE laptops in the house, including a now-vintage iBook G4 have Broadcom chipsets, and are ROCK SOLID. The problem existed with Leopard, and exploded with Snow Leopard. I am about to wipe the whole box and go back to Leopard at this rate! Get busy, Apple, there's something rotten in the state of wi-fi!

Removing ipv6 does not help on the 2 laptops in my house.

I hope 10.6.3 is going to cure this problem !

Sincerely meaning no disrespect, as an Apple user for more than 15 years and spending a great deal of time working on wired and wireless networks for clients, I am having difficulty with the one-note tone of your responses. Technically, the hardware on the problem computer has been tested and is fine. Three other laptops including a Windows XP box with 802.11B and an older iBook 14" connect with a much stronger signal and without ANY dropouts, and only the MacBook Pro 17" I am on right this moment, running SL 10.6.2 has the constant dropout problem, and pathetic signal reception.

Not everyone who needs to connect to a router has the luxury of, authority or know-how to change its settings, so that is an extremely limited workaround. I am having luck right now having dumped aforementioned prefs, assigning a manual address and putting up a Terminal ping. So far, so good for the past hour and a half.

No matter what anyone has experienced, all you seem to be saying is "it works fine for me, check your hardware". Whether the problem is native to or merely more pronounced in Snow Leopard, or there are a bunch of folks out there with faulty Airport Extreme cards, could you not begin to believe that perhaps Apple has a problem here that needs to be solved, rather than point the finger back at the consumer who uses a Mac because "it just works"?

I think most people are not saying this is the users fault, we all seem to think this is real issue. Many are suffering as you are, a few have tried things with some success but no well known answer has arisen. Many have had similar data where one computer does not work while others in the house work fine. Some of the suggestions given have come through discussions with Apple (deleting plists, rebooting, changing up your network preferences). Others are hardware tweeks such as changing the channel to avoid interference that are just good practice. Some are guesses with some thread of hope (changing security).

Legitimately the Airport card in the computers could be going bad, or the antenna is failing. But some of these instances occurred when Snow Leopard was installed.

Universally we hope Apple will read the posts and do something. I have been encouraging people with problems to call Apple. If you have done a Snow Leopard upgrade you get a free call to Applecare. They might be able to diagnose and help.

A while back, a user reported that turning off Airport and resorting to a USB WiFi dongle solved the problem for his MBP. Just wondering if anybody here has tried that. Not the most elegant fix, but if it works, it sure beats waiting for Apple to figure this out.

Tanya Robinson1 wrote:
No matter what anyone has experienced, all you seem to be saying is "it works fine for me, check your hardware". Whether the problem is native to or merely more pronounced in Snow Leopard, or there are a bunch of folks out there with faulty Airport Extreme cards, could you not begin to believe that perhaps Apple has a problem here that needs to be solved, rather than point the finger back at the consumer who uses a Mac because "it just works"?

Note also that it could be Apple's drivers without being Apple's fault if their drivers are complying with the spec and various router(s) are not.

Apple has been pretty good about fixing things that are, in fact, their bugs.

When it's a problem with +third party equipment not performing properly or not following the applicable standards+, they (IMHO correctly) almost never change their software to work around it.

But (yes, you knew this was coming) - the only way for Apple to have enough data to figure it out one way or another is for those of you with the issue to *contact AppleCare*.

I can guarantee you they don't see AirPort connections drop in their labs and just pretend it didn't happen, and if they can't reproduce a problem in their labs it becomes infinitely more difficult to diagnose and fix.

Is your name Cathan (sp?) or Colin from Stillwater?

I recently replaced the original Atheros card, (worked fine for about 2.5 years) in my 1st gen Macbook with a BroadCom. The Atheros signal first started intermittent dropouts, which then became more frequent to a point where it would no longer connect at all. I used a wireless usb adapter for a short while until I found a few folks here that installed the BroadCom. Works perfectly. Full signal, no dropouts. My router is on the 2nd floor at the extreme other side of my house where we normally use the macbook. It's very easy to install. 30 minutes max.

Here's some info on the Broadcom:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=390078420145&ssPageName=STRK: MEWNX:IT $15.00.

Here's a video install guide: http://www.powerbookmedic.com/manual.php?id=1 See Top Case & Trackpad/Airport Assembly.

And another from iFixit: http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/Installing-MacBook-Core-Duo-Airport-Card/287/ 1

The good news: at least one Apple engineer is trying to sort this out. He has just purchased the same model DLink router I have, and asked me to send him screenshots of the network and wireless settings so he can try to reproduce my problem in the lab. (I already ran on my MBP a diagnostic app he sent me that determined a significant delay acquiring an IP address from the router over the wireless channel.) I believe Apple is now taking this seriously (at least one engineer is, and one good engineer is all it will take to identify the issue or issues), though for a long time I thought otherwise.

I do disagree with William Kucharski's assessment, however. Not on technical grounds - in fact I found his many postings very helpful in reducing my own MBP wireless problems from crippling after the upgrade to now little more than an occasional minor nuisance. Rather on business grounds. The Apple products discussed on this thread are for the most part consumer electronics, designed and marketed on the "use it out of the box without expert knowledge" premiss that made Apple's computers SO MUCH MORE attractive than the Windows world's offerings. A producer of consumer products has an obligation (if they wish to survive, let along prosper) to make sure their products work well in the market into which they are sold. That presents a market imperative to Apple to ensure that their laptops work well with all the major routers out there, however crappy.

My collaboration with the Apple engineer has at least convinced me (moderately tech savvy but not in the network arena) that the problem I have experienced is almost certainly buggy software in the DLink router that causes a problem for Snow Leopard -- though not Leopard, as it happens, and not the iPhone nor any Windows machine I or colleagues have used on it. Okay, technically, that's DLink's problem. But from a business perspective, if Apple's consumer products cannot work with DLink and Linksys routers, of which there are millions out there, then it is an Apple problem. Unless, of course, they decide they no longer want to be in the consumer electronic business - and every presentation Steve Jobs makes suggests exactly the opposite.

If apple have only just started to look at this problem there is going to be a lot of very unhappy people. Especially the ones like me the fix will come with 10.6.3 (due very soon).

Also looking at the posting the problem seems to be with multiple router manufacturers and models.

This point very strongly to an Apple problem.

Today one of my MBP became increasingly useless on wifi (from occasional dropout to dropping out continually). Even in WEP security mode which had in the past been ok.

Anyhow wasted an afternoon doing a complete fresh install of leopard (then migration of apps / data afterwards) (at least apple makes this easy).

So far that laptop working ok.

Interestingly after I had done the fresh install and updated with combi update to 10.6.2 the wifi speed was dreadful, so I connected ethernet to do remaining updates (one being airport update) after that wifi speed was back to same as ethernet.

I think William Kucharski's point is that if Apple manufactures and tests to the official interface specs, then technically they are "in the right" and the problem lies in the various brands of router (which likely are all built on hardware from one or two manufacturers, most probably in China). But I agree that as a manufacturer of consumer products, the problem is firmly in Apple's camp for not producing and testing a product that is robust and reliable in the environment into which it is sold. What they should do, but presumably do not, is test their new hardware and software computer releases with a range of routers, certainly including the major brands that dominate the market.

Apple has been looking at this for over a month since I was contacted by an Apple Engineer the first week of January.

As to routers I do not think they are the problem. I have tried 3, first an Apple Airport Extreme, a LinkSys, and a brand new Time Capsule. The problem was exactly the same with all three.

This is a sometimes it is there and sometimes it is not kind of problem and thus very difficult to solve. To my knowledge it has not shown up in the press so although very disturbing to those of us experiencing it I suspect that it happens to far less than 1% of the Snow Leopard installation.

Glad to hear an Apple engineer is trying to really re-create the issue.

I am the person who solved WiFi problems with a USB external WiFi card (Bear Extreme brand). My MacBook had poor signal strength and poor signal to noise ratio at 10.4.8 and upgrading to Snow Leopard did not help (or hurt). This greatly improved the signal strength and great S/N ratio. It was cheaper than a new Airport Card and I did not have to do open heart surgery. It is likely my card or antenna was at issue, but I don't know for sure.

I am from Lake Elmo MN. Not sure if I want to share my name on the forum. Glad to see other Minnesotan on the board.

I think the problem is probably masked for a lot of users as maybe they are not using higher speed wifi or more advanced security.

It for me is when the problems became apparent.

california99 wrote:
What they should do, but presumably do not, is test their new hardware and software computer releases with a range of routers, certainly including the major brands that dominate the market.

They do.

There are literally thousands of different Wi-Fi routers or APs that are currently sold or have been sold, each of which can be configured in a multitude of different ways.

This is further exacerbated by minor model changes where the model number stays the same but the internal router hardware changes completely, perhaps the most well-known example being the LinkSys WRT54G series:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinksysWRT54Gseries

So for example, Linksys currently sells 12 different Wi-Fi routers or access points, each of which is likely available in several hardware revisions and multiple firmware versions. So combined with their legacy products, that would likely require testing multiple configurations of nearly one hundred routers just to be thorough in testing with one vendor's product line.

The post above explains some of the difficulties Apple has to go through; to try and reproduce the D-Link issue they're needing to purchase the same router and set the settings exactly the same, not to mention run the exact same firmware as the user experiencing the issue. Quite often even that isn't enough because the real problem lies in one side or the other not handling interference or other environmental conditions the way the other side expects.

Note this isn't helped in the case of various PC-centric hardware companies that only test their routers with *their own* interface cards running *their own* Windows drivers.

If nothing else, I can assure you that Apple doesn't just test with a handful of routers and ship; the problem is they can't test with every router in every possible environment.