WiFi slowdown (or cap) on Catalina 10.15.2 - but not with SafeBoot and iPhone

About two weeks ago I upgraded all the 7 Macs in our little film production company to the newest version of MacOS X Catalina, 10.15.2. From that moment on, something odd happened that we haven't been able to resolve to this day: the Macs were suddenly "capped" on the company WiFi, which is a Mesh3 created by 4 white Tenda Nova MW6 cubes.

All the Macs are capped to download only at speeds of 18-20Mbs, compared to the 65-70 normally available. However, all IOS and mobile devices do not have any problems and still achieve normal speed rates.

We have tried many different solutions but none until now has brought us closer to a solution. Now this morning in a desperate attempt, we tried booting one of the Macs into SafeMode (for those who don't know what SafeMode is, please look here) - and voilà, all problems gone, WiFi speed is perfect.

Should I just line up with the many others who are complaining to Apple and Tim Cook about the crappy Catalina OS and its updates - or does anybody have an idea how to resolve this strange problem?

MacBook Pro with Touch Bar

Posted on Jan 14, 2020 9:31 AM

Top-ranking reply

Dirk van den Berg Author

Level 1

69 points

Posted on Jan 14, 2020 11:54 PM

EtreCheck report

As a precaution, before the EtreCheck test I removed the third party extensions Little Snitch and PreyProject (an anti-theft utility that already helped me get back my stolen Mac in 2018). However, I want to say to peter_watt that the anathema "third party extensions are no good" is not always true. I have been using LS and Prey for MANY YEARS, and they worked fine on Catalina 10.15 and 10.15.1 without ANY problems, so IMHO they won't suddenly be creating a problem.

As suggested this is the EtreCheck report, plus a screenshot of the Network section.

In addition to this, I have played around with ActivityMonitor and discovered an interesting fact: force-quitting "mDNSReponder" once after a reboot… resolves the problem completely. I did this around 2 hours ago, and a SpeedTest now gives me absolutely perfect results (screenshot nr. 2):

View in context

32 replies

LD150

Level 10

100,149 points

Jan 28, 2020 2:57 PM in response to SohailAfghan

No I know you're not. I was responding to Dirk van den berg as It says at the top of my post.

Jan 28, 2020 8:23 AM in response to Dirk van den Berg

I dont know maybe it has something to do with wifi drivers not present

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WiFi slowdown (or cap) on Catalina 10.15.2 - but not with SafeBoot and iPhone