Q: Dropping Wi FI Signal

My fritzbox router has a spectrum analyser built it.

The automatic channel was selected at channel 2 which showed completely free of interference.

However I had continual dropouts.

So I put it mid band at 7 which had a lot of interference and but no dropouts !

Go figure.

Robin Bonathan wrote:
My fritzbox router has a spectrum analyser built it.

Not a router's spectrum analyzer, a real one, something like:



or at least software that will give you output like this:



This site gives some good examples of what I'm talking about:

http://www.bvsystems.com/e-mailings/BBInterference/BBInterference.htm

Since I dont have 20 grand to spend on one of those.

However my router monitors the 2.4 ghz band and shows interference from all sources.





Robin...

My point is that doesn't show baby monitors, Bluetooth devices, cordless phones, microwave ovens, radio-controlled toys or any of the other devices that can use the 2.4 GHz band; the real spectrum analyzers would.

See the link in my earlier post for an example of what broadcasts from those devices would look like.

But you are missing my point

The built in spectrum analyser DOES measure interference from other sources, cordless phones, microwaves etc etc etc.

Thats why I said as such and you can see on screen shot it shows other interference, have tested it and it works.

But without being able to see the actual waveforms you can't determine what the noise may be and thus whether it's likely to be constant or intermittent.

(For example a microwave oven will likely be intermittent where a baby monitor would likely be pretty much full time.)

MacBooks that lose WiFi connectivity have the problem no matter what channel they're listening in on, and no matter whether they use b, g, or n protocols. (The solution would be trivial otherwise.) And the problem exists, inconsistently, on other networks in other locations. Then there's the firm correlation with the Snow Leopard upgrade. All this makes interference an unlikely culprit, don't you think?

I'm too experiencing dropping wifi signal. But any have tried to check the problem on the same machine downgrading to Leopard or Windows w/ bootcamp driver and check if the problem persists? is not that difficult to verify if it is a problem:

a) Hardware
b) Software
c) Access Point/Router issue
d) Signal/Environment issue

Thank you

jpdemers wrote:
MacBooks that lose WiFi connectivity have the problem no matter what channel they're listening in on, and no matter whether they use b, g, or n protocols. (The solution would be trivial otherwise.) And the problem exists, inconsistently, on other networks in other locations. Then there's the firm correlation with the Snow Leopard upgrade. All this makes interference an unlikely culprit, don't you think?

Keep in mind that b and g use the same frequency band, 2.4 GHz, as can n. Thus one baby monitor or microwave oven can wipe out all channels in all protocols because it's broadband interference. Cordless phones are especially adept at this because they "channel hop" so they may be cycling through interfering with different channels on a timed cycle.

As for the Snow Leopard upgrade, some have had success going back to Leopard, while others, who claimed that SL "broke" things, have had no success when reinstalling Leopard.

It's a tricky and painful issue to diagnose, I know.

But you seem to forget that in quite a few cases its just the mac that fail.

In My case 2 laptops running 10.6 SL. crap out.

My iphone does not.
My sons laptop running windows does not.
my skype phone does not.

SL laptops do !!!

Robin Bonathan wrote:
But you seem to forget that in quite a few cases its just the mac that fail.

Unfortunately you can't necessarily blame that on the Macs; I've gone over that far too many times already.

OK guys, I think we're all losing sight of the main issue and going off at tangents. For most contributors to this post, all was working fine until a system update and now suddenly it's not. In my case, after reading hundreds of posts on the subject and trying everything recommended, I spent half an hour on the phone to a very helpful techie at Apple UK who concluded, after trying lots of things including booting from the instal disk, that it was actually an airport hardware problem. I've since taken my MacBook into an Apple service centre who have come to the same conclusion. It might just have been a coincidence in my case that the hardware should fail immediately after an update... but worth investigating. Good luck.

William Kucharski wrote:

Robin Bonathan wrote:
But you seem to forget that in quite a few cases its just the mac that fail.

Unfortunately you can't necessarily blame that on the Macs; I've gone over that far too many times already.

Seriously? - Off the record.... Do you work for Apple? William, you are a very helpful individual on AD, and I am by no means trying to erode any of your credibility. Reading some of your other responses on other threads, you have been of great help, to me included. In most cases I didn't even need to even post anything, because I read through threads and see the fix. But, in this case, can you actually believe that statement that you just made?

By saying something like that, is like slapping all of these people in the face. By this stage of the game, I think that we can all say that it is the Macs. Now, is there an easy solution? No, of course not, that is why it is not fixed yet.



Well, a few things in all of these almost one-thousand posts is consistent. Wireless, Snow Leopard, different routers, other pieces of hardware that work.

10.5 works, 10.6 doesn't. Everything else works. I am by no means an electrical engineer, but I can tell you that I don't need a spectrum analyzer to know what piece of hardware is in error.

NicholasKell wrote:
Seriously? - Off the record.... Do you work for Apple? William, you are a very helpful individual on AD, and I am by no means trying to erode any of your credibility. Reading some of your other responses on other threads, you have been of great help, to me included. In most cases I didn't even need to even post anything, because I read through threads and see the fix. But, in this case, can you actually believe that statement that you just made?

If I had a dime for every time I was suspected of working for Apple, I might not have to work for anyone.

By saying something like that, is like slapping all of these people in the face. By this stage of the game, I think that we can all say that it is the Macs. Now, is there an easy solution? No, of course not, that is why it is not fixed yet.

No, we can't "all say it is the Macs." We don't have any data proving it's the Macs, and worse yet even some who swear it is the Macs end up having their problem fixed by something else.

Some who have sworn the loudest that 10.6 "broke" their Macs have found that upon reinstalling 10.5… things still don't work.

Some have reinstalled 10.5 and have found that did fix their problems; in those cases Mac OS X may have been at fault.

Some have taken their Macs into the Apple Store and have found a hardware issue to have been the root cause of their problems.

Many others have found interference, DNS settings, router firmware or other router issues to be at the root of their issues.

While you can say "hmmm, this worked but now it doesn't" or "that works but this doesn't," you cannot say "that doesn't work, it's that device's fault." There are simply too many variables involved.

For long time readers of this thread, I hate to drag this out again but:

Say there's a router bug where, when asked to add "2 + 3" the router calculates the answer as "5" but when asked to add "3 + 2" the router erroneously calculates the answer as "6."

If say Windows, Mac OS X 10.5, and even perhaps Mac OS X 10.6 on every platform except one particular revision of MacBook ask the router to add "2 + 3" but that MacBook adds "3 + 2" then "everything but that MacBook" will work - and it's not Apple's fault nor should they have to change their code to work around that particular router.

I'm not saying Apple's code doesn't have bugs, and I'm not saying the issues many here are seeing are not Apple's fault, but what I am saying is we cannot say that definitively with the data we have.

William Kucharski wrote:
Some have reinstalled 10.5 and have found that did fix their problems; in those cases Mac OS X may have been at fault.

Ryan83 - In the original post of this thread - wrote:
Ever since I installed 10.6 -- I constantly drop my wifi connection.

Hummm.....


This is also my situation, as it is the situation of most here. If anyone is contributing to this thread that is not conforming to the OP's issue, perhaps another thread should be started to properly address their issue.