10.6.5 and wifi issues

What wireless mode are you on ? 11n/ 11g ? You might just want to buy yourself a under 50$ wireless router that does 11n and enjoy better connectivity. Carrier based router's ( 2 Wire/ SMC etc.) are pretty pathetic when it comes to performance and keeping up with standards and updating firmware etc.

Michael,
I would recommend you get rid of your supposed fix. Try getting rid of this setting and there is a high chance your wireless will work just fine now if it's working already.
What's even worse is that if you have this custom setting, the next time Apple releases a software update, it might end up not updating this file or picking an invalid setting since your file has some invalid data in it that you added and you might run into worser issues.
As a rule of thumb do not ever update internal plist files by hand unless you know exactly what you are doing.

Harry,
You have an Atheros based card.
An easy way to check is launch System Profiler and then look under Network->AirPort on the left panel.
Click on it and on the right side you will notice something to this effect:

Card Type: AirPort Extreme (0x14E4, 0xD1)
Firmware Version: Broadcom BCM43xx 1.0 (5.10.131.36.1)

If it says Broadcom, you know its a Broadcom chipset. If it says Atheros, you have an Atheros card.

Deleting the keychain entries works for me so far.

Apple advertised this update as improving Airport connectivity.

After such an improvement you should not have to be faffing about, changing channels,deleting keychains etc etc.

This is a nonesense.

Just accept the fact that if your mac is 3 years old or older it is finished.

Go out and get a new one.

That's what Apple want you to do anyway so just do it!

PS I "regraded" my mac back to 10.6.2 after 10.6.5 - solid as a rock now. Thanks Apple.

I am on a late 2007 MacBook and experiencing the same wifi dropouts.

The main problem I have is returning from sleep - most of the time my MacBook cannot re-establish a connection to the closed WPA2 Personal network provided through my late 2007 AirPort Extreme.

Everything was working fine on 10.6.4.

Have tried a few of the suggestions and things have been temporarily better, then actually revert to being worse (e.g. logging off and back on again has restored a connection; followed a few suggestions and at times not even a reboot will fix things...)

A bit nervous of updating my iPhone to 4.2 now...

These steps worked perfectly for me. Thanks!

Here the same problem. I noticed that I'm not able anymore to connect at any 2.4 Ghz network. But it work great with an base airport extreme 802.11N at 5 ghz.
I tried to initialize my hard drive (2 times) and my airport starts to work again, after the system update to 10.6.5 it fails again triyng to connect a wifi network. I need a fix

Message was edited by: gilduz

Are you using WEP and 802.11N only in 2.4? If so, change to WPA2 PSK.

Me too.

Hi Corbasse,
thanks a lot for your post. It gave me the decisive hint to solve my problem.
I used airport + router (Vigor 2200) set to 169.254.x.x (+ manuall ID) unevenentfully for several years. Problems started after the 10.6.5 update: all non-Apple programs still got through to the internet, but Safari, Apple-software-update etc. refused to connect.
As you described, I changed to a 192.168.x.x setup (+ DHCP) and all problems were solved !
To those who have the above mentioned wifi problems, I can only recommend to check the settings of their router.

It may be a good idea if Safari could incorporate a "WiFi Reset" feature (similar to the existing "Safari Reset" option), that deletes existing relevant plists and keychain passwords and then gives a box to enter a new network name, security setting and encryption code. To enable a clean instal after things get messy, as they do.

I do want to say that I had two concurrent problems last night with my internet. Here was my timeline (w/o times!):

1. Updated MacBook Pro (2010) to 10.6.5
2. Restarted computer
3. Logged onto computer, WiFi connects to router, but not to internet.
4. Grabbed smartphone, changed to WiFi access - was able to get on internet
5. Grabbed Windows XP laptop, was able to get on internet.
6. Researched (Google) 10.6.5 wifi problem, found this thread.
7. Ran through steps listed above.
8. Internet worked on MacBook Pro w/ 10.6.5 update installed.

Now, what I found out a little later when I got on Twitter, was that there was a Charter DNS outage in my area. (ended up being a 4-state outage, for what it's worth) However, I don't think the DNS situation was the whole problem, as I was able to get on the internet through the same Wireless router, that I couldn't get on with my MacBook Pro w/ 10.6.5.

I only mention this because I talked with a colleague at work this morning, and mentioned 10.6.5 breaking my wifi, and he mentioned the DNS outage.

del.amateuer wrote:
Hi Corbasse,
thanks a lot for your post. It gave me the decisive hint to solve my problem.

Hi del.amateuer,

I'm glad I was able to be of service, and that it worked out for you too.

It would have been a nice touch of Apple if they would have issued some warning/statement that support of this type of faulty network settings would be discontinued, instead of letting us search blindly by ourselves for days or weeks...

Luckily I happened to discover that our router had a bad contact so we could just have it replaced. It would have cost us some major hassle and many weeks of non-productivity to get the settings fixed otherwise. We have a leased router with no user access. It would have cost many miles of local government red tape to get the settings changed, which is why we never corrected this before although we wanted to...

I've experienced the same problem on my MacBook Pro 2009 model, with a Netgear DGN2000 Router: the Mac simply didn't connect to WiFi (instead iPhone and other PCs connected to it without problems). I tried to change channel (from 3 to 6), to remove Airport and all other suggestions given in this topic, but they didn't work.
Today i tried to update router's firmware and... Everything is OK!! So, before trying these solutions, remember to update your router or modem!