What's your Airport Card Country code?

Hey there. Definitely something up with Snow Leopard, country codes and airport wireless N 5GHz. I have 3 macs and 3 airport routers across the house, which have been working for years without issue wirelessly. Since the upgrade to Snow Leopard, my Macbook, and only my Macbook started not being able to connect or see the 5GHz network. My Macbook Pro and Mac Pro have no issues connecting or seeing the 5GHz network. It's not related to weak signal as I've tested the Macbook sitting next to the Airport Extreme. Interestingly there was no problem with 2.4GHz.

So I thought it might have been a coincidental breakdown of the 5GHz N antenna on the airport card in the Macbook post Snow Leopard upgrade.

Then I noticed a few posts on the net about Country Codes, Airport and Snow Leopard. This has never been an issue for me before. The Country Code is set at FR on my Macbook which is incorrect. Apparently this is set by Snow Leopard in response to routers available.

As you are aware some channels are not usable in some countries.

So I changed my Airport Extreme channel from Automatic to a fixed channel (36), and instantly the problem has been solved.

So something has changed with Snow Leopard, Country Codes and Airport, which only affects some Macs. Ugh

At least my problem was solved, hope this helps

For what it's worth, both our Macbooks here in Madrid (Spain) have the country code FR (France?). I don't know how it was before upgrading to 10.6.1...

The older black one has occasional loss of WiFi but seems to recover if I disconnect/reconnect the airport. I put in a new location which helped to start with. It is now back on auto.

My new MBP has no problem.

We have a Belkin N router. It seems that all our neighbours are still on g and use different channels. We are also the only ones using WPA2 personal.

Does this information help?

One other thing, the computer is unable to set the Time Zone automatically in Date/Time preferences. I don't know why not...

Message was edited by: putnik

Message was edited by: putnik

andre.mengatti wrote:
It's seems that either I have a faulty Airport Card, or Snow Leopard changes the card locale depending which routers are available for connection.

That's exactly what it does.

When an AirPort interface is turned on, it listens for 802.11d beacon packets, and those contain what is called a regulatory domain field.

The AirPort driver uses the first valid regdomain setting it sees.

So for example Andre's issue is that there's someone (illegally) using a router intended for sale in Zimbabwe in his neighborhood.

Likewise, at college, someone is improperly using a US router.

Unfortunately, there's not a really good way around this.

I looked at my router settings and cannot see any "regulatory domain field" to check if the incorrect country code is in my router or if the computer is latching onto a neighbour's.

Is there a way to tell what router the beacon latches on to (they are all listed in the System Profiler)?
Does it relate to the lack of ability to find the correct time zone in the Date/Time preferences?
Should I report this as an error to Apple or Belkin?
Is it important?

Message was edited by: putnik

The regulatory domain is given by the message logged to the dmesg buffer, e.g.:

en1: 802.11d country code set to 'US'.

The country code of your router is whichever one it was legally purchased for use in.

If you see something strange, it's the router of some neighbor or another.

Who to report it to?

Good question. I think Apple has implemented a specification that assumes you won't be spoofed by your neighbor's bad equipment. My suggestion would be to talk to Apple. They can't fix the specification, but they might be able to fix the way that it chooses the beacon it latches onto.

Thank you for your reply

Sorry I'm quite new to Macs. Can you tell me how to look at the "dmesg buffer".

It occurs to me that I bought the Belkin N1 router at Carrefour in Madrid which is a huge supermarket chain based in France. It may well be that it started life the other side of the Pyrenees.

It seems important to know if Belkin need to change my router country code or if Apple needs to get my computer to latch onto my router and not my neighbour's.

Could this affect WiFi connectivity?

You did not answer my question about the effect of this on the computer's ability to automatically change the Time Zone in Date/Time Preferences.

Thanks for any clarification.

Message was edited by: putnik

putnik wrote:
You did not answer my question about the effect of this on the computer's ability to automatically change the Time Zone in Date/Time Preferences.

The regulatory domain of your AirPort interface has nothing to do with Date/Time preference settings.

Both my computers are normally showing they are in France (FR).

I still do not know how to check my own router's Regulatory Domain directly from the 802.11d log (mesg buffer) so I turned it off to test other routers in the neighbourhood.

I then joined several other of the many insecure networks visible at my house. Each time, the Country Code changed to Spain (ES). This would indicate to me that I do not have a "Dominant French Neighbour" and that the error is in my own router.

In this case I do not have a problem with Apple but will contact Belkin instead.

I had presumed that you had verified the country code of your own router first.

William,

I did ask... Can you tell me how to look at the "dmesg buffer".

Another possibility is that my neighbours all use wireless g and the problem may be only with Snow Leopard plus wireless n.

Belkin have a beta firmware update available but I shall wait to see what they say about this.

Enter the following into a Terminal window:

sudo dmesg

and provide your administrator password when asked.

Thank you. This also gives "en1: 802.11d country code set to 'FR' " on both computers.

The thing about this is that it would be rather difficult for Mac OS X to get this "wrong" and just happen to say, set FR rather than AU.

In particular, 802.11d beacon packets contain the country code information as a three-letter character sequence containing the ISO 3166-alpha2 code element denoting the router's country of authorized operation followed by either a space, the letter "I" for indoor environments, or the letter "O" for outdoor environments.

The AirPort code is closed source, so I can't say for sure what it's doing, but you'd have to code the driver in a rather interesting way to get "FR" from the string "AU," or perhaps "ZW" from "BR"… 😟

So in Brazil, Australia and Spain we all have immigrant neighbours with powerful routers or have bought our's from a dodgy street trader...

This is only a wireless n problem and I would guess a coding error is returning incorrect strings to the computer or an absence of information is causing it to default to a particular value.

Since it is happening all around the world I don't think it is a router problem either unless they have something in common (like maybe a batch of routers were coded for France but subsequently shipped to Spain and Australia etc). But then it is happening on many different makes of router.

This still seems to be an Apple problem.