WiFi Issues With MacBook Air

Count me in on this wifi-issue...!
I have a wifi-problem as well with my brand new MBA. I really don't understand why it is like this. The wireless is working perfectly on my MacBook Air all the time until I plug in my 24" Cinema Display using the Mini Displayport plug. The all of a sudden, the webbrowser stops downloading the pages. And it starts again as soon as I unplug the external screen.

Anyone having an idea of what to do? And anyone experiencing the same?

I have a new Macbook Air 1 inch, and my WiFi works for about 30 minutes, and then I can't reach anything on the internet. I have to turn off my Airport and then turn it back on, and then it works again for another 30 minutes or so.

My new Macbook Air (2010) also had a few internet connection drops every hour. I have modified the Router wireless settings from WPA2 to WEP and from Wi-Fi Protected Setup to Manual. I use Linksys WRT54G2. I have not had any drop for a couple days so far.

I thought that the 13" was a great size laptop. The 11" is cool looking, but regardless of the wifi, I thnk being able to type on a keyboard of a MBA 1" would be the most difficult...
Sly

Indeed! A 1" would be impressive, and I wouldn't be surprised if a 1" MBA had the same connection issues we're having, but at 11" or 13" Apple really should be able to make it stable.

But thanks for posting your experience Daniel Choi1.

Hi Mr Gauss, I'm pleased that you've managed to configure your network to get a stable connection with your MBA.

However the fact that it wasn't working before is still symptomatic of a problem with the MacBook - I guess your other devices were working happily on your existing network without the need for some tinkering.

If you could, please try and take your Air round your local town and have a try in some internet hotspots where you can't configure the network settings and give us some feedback.

Cheers
Nick

+Surely, you might think, a super thin portable laptop with no ethernet connection MUST be principally designed to work with all wireless networks??+

But that's no solution - this is a Macbook Air - it's designed to work without wires, connections or devices, so why would you want to have to plug in a USB adapter?

Interesting response from Apple, but why would they not also include backwards compatibility?

Do they expect us to wait around until every other router in the world breaks and is replaced by a new one?

It was just a hunch.
My son's MBA drops out in the lounge room (although no connection problem with my MB nor PS3).
Although there are no dropout problems when my son's MBA is sitting in the same room as the Airport Extreme.
Has anyone tried attaching an external WiFi aerial?

Mine has zero problems and i use a netgear n router

As an update to my issue, I think it might have more to do with my old Airport than the MacBook Air. I say that because I started having issues with connectivity on my iMac as well. Maybe the MBA is just more sensitive to lapses in the Airport's connection? I don't know, but I think I'm in the market for a new Airport Extreme.

Another update.

Since my last post (when I had switched to 5Ghz 802.11n only) I've had no problems with connectivity at home. My MBP, iPad and late 2010 MBA all work perfectly - though of course my Phone 4 won't work with this type of connection.

I've since undertaken more business trips with my MBA, most recently to Switzerland, and I had perfect connectivity all the way. In fact on my journey home from Zurich my MBA worked exctly as it should - powered up for the whole journey, I got perfect (effortless and instant) connections at my Swiss hotel, Zurich Airport, Heathrow and even the Heathrow Express.

Unfortunately, I was unable to draw few concrete conclusions from the experience - all connections were 802.11 g links, signal strength ranged from poor to excellent, and the connections were a mix of secure (hotel) and unsecure (public hotspots).

Once back at home the MBA worked perfectly again - Channel 100, 802.11n, 5Ghz only. One of the first things I picked up was a Macrumors report that there's an MBA software update which fixes - wait for it - wake up issues with comms. I've yet to do this, but will be interested to see if there's any suggestion that the connection issues are also fixed.

So, four weeks in, and about 10 or 12 different Wi-Fi connections later, I have an MBA which appears to work most of the time. Problem is, I bought it because I wanted it to work ALL the time. I'm beginning to believe that what I'm experiencing are problems which occur with older wireless routers (like my first gen Airport Extreme) when there are lots of devices (and so channels) in use. In theory, jumping up to 5Ghz increases the bandwidth and removes the impact of interference from other devices which are using the 'standard' (2.4Ghz) band, but of course can't confirm this.

The bottom line is that irrespective of any theories we might all have, and whatever the root cause, the MBA shouldn't be doing this so I have booked an appointment to a local Premium Reseller who took my concerns seriously. I'll report back once I have any worthwhile news.

Some more information regarding this issue:

I am curently staying at a hotel where my MBA 11" has problems with the WiFi network. It can see the network, can make a connection, get's assigned an IP address (which the hotel's IT people tell me is valid), but when I try to use the connection it doesn't work - Safari tells me that my computer isn't connected to the Internet.

I can see the router which the WiFi network is connected to (I can ping it from a terminal), but DNS lookups do not work.

This machine happily connects to other WiFi networks - I have a 802.11n (Belkin) network at home, an 802.11g (Netgear) network at home, an 802.11g (Huawei) mobile broadband device, and I have successfully used several other public WiFi connections.

Now the interesting part: In an attempt to get round the problem I bought a USB WiFi dongle (Amped UA150C), but this did not solve the problem (behaved exactly the same as the computer's built-in interface), but whilst playing around with it I discovered that running a Windows 7 or Ubuntu 10.10 virtual machine with networking set to "bridged" did work - the virtual machine can connect with no problems (I am typing this on a Windows 7 VM running on my MBA at the moment). I then removed the USB WiFi dongle and tried the same thing with the MBA's built-in WiFi adapter, and sure enough that works fine too - so there clearly isn't a hardware problem, but an issue with the drivers under MacOS (10.6.6).

So come on Appple - Microsoft and Canonical can write drivers for your hardware which work, why can't you?

one more thing... My hotel is in Sunnyvale, so if anyone from Apple wants to do some debugging, I'd be more than happy to drive up to Cupertino and bring you back here to do some testing...

I picked up my new Macbook Air a couple of days ago and I too have had appallingly unreliable wireless performance.

Today I solved the problem.

My iphone and PCs all work fine so the problem lies with the Mac. The Mac worked fine some of the time so it did not seem to be an intrinsic problem in the machine.

The cause is Airport is constantly searching for networks and it looses the current connection while doing it. It does the search every 10 seconds.

The solution is in two parts:
1. In Network Preferences clear the check box for Ask to join new networks. That stops the searching and solves the problem.

2. Don't click on the Airport icon on the menu bar. If you do that it tells Airport to search for a network and you will lose the current connection.