WiFi Dropped Connections after Supplemental Update to Catalina 10.15.5

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WiFi Dropped Connections after Supplemental Update to Catalina 10.15.5

I had no problems with WiFi and Catalina until this past week when my 2014 iMac now drops Wifi connections randomly throughout the day. I have been working from home since March and this wasn't an issue until very recently.

I have tried the solutions I had read online for Catalina in general:

1. Rebooted router,
2. Reset router,
3. Created new Location in Network Preferences,
4. Split 2GHz and 5GHz bands and chose each band explicitly.

Short of getting this fixed in the next MacOs update, does anyone have any other ideas? Thanks!

iMac 21.5″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Jun 8, 2020 7:34 AM

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TechGuru74 Author

Level 1

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Jun 18, 2020 1:07 PM in response to Old Toad

I actually discovered that this was caused by a recent upgrade to my Roku Express from 9.2.x to 9.3.

I learned that the Roku Express creates its own WiFi Access Point (AP) to communicate with its remote. The Roku 9.3 update has a bug that sets up a 2.4GHz network right on the same channel as your home's WiFi AP. This caused my router (which was set to automatic configuration) to continually move the WiFi channel to another channel that wasn't being used. Unfortunately, the Roku followed it and it kept doing this continuously until my iMac just gave up switching bands.

The fix for this is to downgrade the Roku Express back to 9.2.x until they issue a patch.

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