Bpasdar
Level 1 (0 points)

Q: Macbook Air Extremely Slow Wireless

Hello All,

Got my brand new MB-Air and from the get-go noticed extremely slow wireless performance. I did a bit of digging and here is what I found.

The MB-Air works OK with cheap (consumer) wireless APs, however when used in conjunction with the commercial APs most of which use the Atheros chipset the performance is horrible. I found that when connecting to APs that use Atheros' commercial chipset, the MB-Air connects with 802.11 G specs instead of N even when the signal metrics are excellent such as -39 RSSI.

Moreover, even With the 802.11 G connection at 54Mbps the performance is both sluggish and latent. Small file transfers have a 50/50 shot at working and large file transfers seem to die reliably. Albeit this could be an issue with Apple's implementation of SMB / Samba which is rather poor.

I have tried to turn off Bluetooth to see if my experience is different. We'll see.

I would be interested in feedback from people who are also experiencing the same poor wireless performance to learn the chipset of the AP they are having issues with.

By-the-way -- I will take a fix, if someone has come up with one. However my guess is that this is an engineering issue that Apple has to fix.

BP

Macbook Air Late 2010, Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Nov 6, 2010 4:14 AM

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Bpasdar

Q: Macbook Air Extremely Slow Wireless

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  • by Xav8tor,

    Xav8tor Xav8tor Nov 6, 2010 6:42 AM in response to Bpasdar
    Level 1 (50 points)
    Nov 6, 2010 6:42 AM in response to Bpasdar
    My experience has been the exact opposite. I have four other PC's, two top of the line, and none give me the wireless performance of my MBA, which I have carried all over and connected on a wide variety on networks, some huge public facilities. At home, my Air achieves published AT&T download/upload speeds while my PC's are running well if they get half that. Large downloads up to almost 1GB have been fast with no hiccups. I can't explain the difference, but I can sure see it. I do have BT turned off.

  • by Bpasdar,

    Bpasdar Bpasdar Nov 6, 2010 7:02 AM in response to Xav8tor
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 6, 2010 7:02 AM in response to Xav8tor
    Thanks, but I have a feeling you are using consumer grade gear and perhaps not commercial wireless chipset as I mentioned in my post. Regardless of your experience, I definitely have problems with my MBA. Mac Book pro and other older macs work just fine, just not the Air.

  • by Xav8tor,

    Xav8tor Xav8tor Nov 6, 2010 7:50 AM in response to Bpasdar
    Level 1 (50 points)
    Nov 6, 2010 7:50 AM in response to Bpasdar
    Nope, I get similar fast results using the wireless network at a 1,000 bed medical complex that spans about 8 city blocks. I doubt that is a consumer grade setup. I'd take it in to an Apple store and have a diagnostic run on it if it is so slow. That just doesn't sound right. Apple is now targeting Fortune 500 companies too (with great success)and I can't see how they would put out a product like this that would not play nice in that environment.

  • by ESanchez,

    ESanchez ESanchez Nov 6, 2010 9:51 PM in response to Bpasdar
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 6, 2010 9:51 PM in response to Bpasdar
    I was having the same problem and it turned out to be my WiFi's channel - it didn't like the "automatic" setting on my Time Capsule. Switched to channel 6 and now my Air speed is fine.

  • by ppaulojr,

    ppaulojr ppaulojr Nov 11, 2010 6:54 AM in response to Bpasdar
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 11, 2010 6:54 AM in response to Bpasdar
    Mini is a brand new Macbook 7,1 and I have tried several AP with or without WEP, WPA, WPA2 and Multiple channels from 1 to 13

    The results are disappointing: 0.55Mb/s download and 0.13Mb/s download in SpeedTest.net

    We have a 100Mb/s connection here!

  • by Matt Madison,

    Matt Madison Matt Madison Nov 13, 2010 12:39 PM in response to ESanchez
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 13, 2010 12:39 PM in response to ESanchez
    This seems to have done the trick for me, too - manually selecting the channels on my Airport Extreme makes my new Air's wireless much more reliable.

  • by CereS2010,

    CereS2010 CereS2010 Nov 13, 2010 2:12 PM in response to Matt Madison
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 13, 2010 2:12 PM in response to Matt Madison
    Selecting a fixed channel worked here too, on a FritzBox Wireless Router.
    Before i had like one reconnect every 1-2 Minutes.

    Thanks for the hint,

    Regards,
    C.

  • by wifiguru,

    wifiguru wifiguru Nov 21, 2010 8:15 PM in response to Bpasdar
    Level 2 (240 points)
    Nov 21, 2010 8:15 PM in response to Bpasdar
    Bpasdar,
    A large number of Dlink AP's/Belkin/Netgear AP's use the Atheros chipset and the Mac works well with most of them.
    What AP model are you using ? Is it a Wi-Fi Certified AP and if you are using 11n, is it draft 2.0 or newer ?
    What security are you using ? Mac's won't do WEP in 802.11n mode, only Open and WPA2

  • by James_Gentry,

    James_Gentry James_Gentry Nov 27, 2010 5:25 PM in response to Matt Madison
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 27, 2010 5:25 PM in response to Matt Madison
    What do you mean by change the channel? I have an Imac and new MBA and an Airport Extreme wifi router. On the iMac I'm getting over 20 mb/s (wired connection), on my MBA less than 3 mb/s, and on my iphone 12 mb/s. The MBA is definitely SLOW. How do I change the channel on the extreme? Any additional suggestions?

  • by William Kucharski,

    William Kucharski William Kucharski Nov 29, 2010 9:53 PM in response to James_Gentry
    Level 6 (15,118 points)
    Mac OS X
    Nov 29, 2010 9:53 PM in response to James_Gentry
    James_Gentry wrote:
    How do I change the channel on the extreme? Any additional suggestions?


    Start the AirPort Utility, select your AirPort Extreme in the left side bar, then click the "Manual Setup" button at the bottom of the main window.

    Click on the "AirPort" icon at the top of the window and on the "Wireless" tab.

    Change the channel from "Automatic" to 1, 6 or 11, then click "Update" and allow your AirPort Express to reboot and see if your throughput improves.

  • by MCDUFFY,

    MCDUFFY MCDUFFY Jan 21, 2011 9:13 AM in response to William Kucharski
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jan 21, 2011 9:13 AM in response to William Kucharski
    This did the trick for me as well on my new MB Air. However, I had to play around with a few different channel changes before the WiFi connection started running as it should. Obviously would be better if this problem didn't exist at all (resulted in about 30 mins of frustration before I found this forum), but fixed nonetheless.

    Thanks for the help -

  • by rtdunham,

    rtdunham rtdunham Feb 14, 2011 8:14 PM in response to William Kucharski
    Level 2 (333 points)
    Feb 14, 2011 8:14 PM in response to William Kucharski
    Sitting side-by-side, my MBA was averaging less than 1 Mb/s on downloads, and my MBP more than 9 Mb/s. The MBP was fully ten times faster. As you can imagine, viewing videos was a ragged, unpleasant experience on the MBA.
    I'm using an early wireless-N Belkin router, so it didn't show up on airport utility, thus i couldn't change channels there as proposed on this thread. But to isolate the problem, at my brother's suggestion i took both computers to a Starbucks, and observed the two computers downloading there at equal speeds. So clearly the problem wasn't with my MBA, but my router.
    I went to Belkin's website to figure out how to change channels on the router, and checked for firmware updates. There was one, so i figured I'd do that before attacking the "changing channels" task. I upgraded the firmware, and with that simple fix my MBA is happily zipping along now with >9 Mb/s downloads, same as the MBP. More than TEN times faster than before. My iPhone download speeds increased more than tenfold, too.
    My advice, if you're having wireless problems with your MBA: First make sure your router's running the latest firmware.

  • by sharly09,

    sharly09 sharly09 Mar 11, 2011 4:47 PM in response to Bpasdar
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Mar 11, 2011 4:47 PM in response to Bpasdar
    hi.

    I just bought a MB Air 11" and the wifi was extremely slow too. I turned off bluetooth and now it is very fast! (42 MB download / 3.66 MB upload)

    regards

  • by robdale,

    robdale robdale Mar 31, 2011 7:01 AM in response to sharly09
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Mar 31, 2011 7:01 AM in response to sharly09
    Well, looks like that worked for me as well. As soon as I turned off bluetooth, the wireless speed jumped from 0.98mb/s download to 8.15mb/s

    Hope Apple will come up with a fix for this since I was using a bluetooth keyboard and mouse (Apple).
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