Q: WiFi Issues With MacBook Air

I'm not a huge tech guy at all, but I also don't understand how my "solution" (using that word tentatively as it hasn't worked for everyone) relates to the issue at all. Glad I could help who I did!

I am trying to download Mountain Lion and can't belive that I am still waiting for it to complete the download some three hours later..I have fast broadband and can normally download to my PC at the a very fast speeds. I can't even find out how far through downloading the software is. I am not getting problems with lost connections or don't think I am but I cant see the download bar I am used to seeing on my PC. Any help welcomed.

teh srevice order didn't work for me. Had teh problem before upgrading to mountain lion, have it afterwards. No improvement. Tried to disable the sleep functions for the computer (but not the screen): didn't work.

I;m stuffed.

So does a hotspot cellphone work? kinda ***** doesn't it mr apple? Where is the quality you promised us? What do you do with the 80 billion dollars profit that you made? Shouldn't you put that back into making your products robust?

Come on Apple, Steve is turning over in his grave!

MacBook Air running Mountain Lion. Although after upgrade to 10.8 I continue having trouble connecting and staying connected to most WiFi systems, the personal hotspot feature of my iPhone works reliabily. I sometimes takes a few trys and a few minutes to look for and locate the iPhone hotspot, once it is located and I connect, I am on the Internet. Given the difficulty of connecting to other networks, this has been my salvation.

I just got may MBA 13" (2012) two days ago and so far I am here sitting at home with a perfectly working 2008 13" MBP but the air won't connect to any thing. I have tried reseting routers, computer to computer network, blue tooth the my IPhone, laptop and iphone networks and no response. I feel very silly thinking that I have to go out and see if it connect somewhere else.  Apple I am big fan I expect this to work and get resolved soon.

Wifi issues have been a recurring problem for Apple products for years, with the worst offending products being the iMac and Air models.  I owned an early 2012 iMac that would lose connection everyday despite 3 other PC's, an iPad, and an iphone having no issues.  I went through rounds with tech support, reset my router, changed the channel, renewed the DCHP lease, etc- and nothing worked.  I finally became so irritated by the issue I sold my iMac for several hundred dollars less than I paid for it just to end the nightmare ! There are few computer issues more annoying than a product which cannot do the sole thing it was intended to do (being able to reliably connect to the Internet).

Apple hasn't yet realized how damaging this is to its brand reputation, and most likely will not come to grasp the severity until Mac sales start to dip, with the potential to take other Apple products down with them.  I for one, am dissapointed and angry with Apple- for failing to address this issue once an for all.  However, not yet angry enough to abandon them completely. My confidence in Apple however, has been deeply diminished and this issue has single handedly caused me to have a wifi complex and to doubt the quality of all Apple products.

The most reliable computer Apple makes in my opinion, in terms of wifi is the non Retina MacBook Pro. I personally like the Air, but bought a Pro model I like less due to this issue. Someday if Apple continues failing to fix this,  I will move on. Apple competitors are making some excellent products that do not have wifi issues- the nexus 7, galaxy s3, and Sam sung series 9 pc's come to mind.

In your case though, since you bought your Air two days ago, I implore you to not waste any more of your time and go exchange your Air for a new one or Pro model. Also, don't bother with tech support or the genius bar- they won't find any wifi issues as Apple stores have multiple routers, repeaters, wifi boosters and servers to make sure all units in store have strong signals. 

You could try purchasing a new wireless n router, and even an extender to play in the room in which you mostly use the Air- but also - Exchange this unit NOW  !  It certainly seems like you got a particularly defective one.  Best of luck to you.

the only solution I can think of is to return the product within the return period. Its been more than one and half year and no progress on this issue from apple side. Moreover, this problem is also being faced by MBP owners as well as ipad users. Either no one from Apple read these forums or otherwise this is some thing that Apple team is not capable to resolve such a major issue. Time to go back to windows . 

Well, I can solev my connectivity problem by resetting my modem/router (the one from the provider). In my setup, I hate using my provider's modem/router, so I use my AEBS as a bridge. However, the b@st@rds didn't set up their modem/router as a modem only unit, which means I cannot do PPoE the AEBS. It also wreaks some havoc onany and all other connections being a bit shaky. However,most units connect to the internet without a problem,including my 2010 iMac (although that one too is less reliable). Maybe I'll get a wifi dongle for Mac and use that hahaha! Kinda *****, but it's a nice embarassment for apple to see how competitor products are needed to resque apple products.

Hi,

I have had the same issue with my brand new MacBook Air 13".

After some investigation and some testing. The problem seemed to be a conflict with the Bluetooth signal (I had a trackpad set up to use Bluetooh). When I turned off the Bluetooth, my wiFi connectivity issues were corrected immediately.

I'm returning my trackpad and getting a normal mouse. However, this doesn't bode well if I want to use any other Bluetooth devices, so I'll be bringing in my MBA for a discussion with the folks I bought if from.

Apple - If you have radio devices conflicting in your new MBAs, you just need to admit it and sort it out. I big company like you with all your money should be able to sort quickly

DinoWonder

Bluetooth is already off - so not the core issue.

already tried the new Location and MTU size and the system.plistpreferences - neither one of these appears to be the core problem...starting to get ticked off now -

Ugh -

Ok here's 1 fix that is working for me - for the last hour, so not able to say that it's a fix for everyone but give it a shot if you can.

My linksys router - e4200 has two networks and a guest network. Tried the Fix#1 - new network location and DHCP renew and Fix#2 - MTU size manual down from 1500 to 1453.

Since my default setting in my linksys config has a MTU size of 1500 - I didn't try changing that to match my MBA's MTU size to see if that worked. Might be a worthwhile experiment.

What worked tho - is removing my 802.11n 2.4 Ghz network (tried a different channel, but that didn't work either) and connecting instead to a 5Ghz network. Both networks are non-SSID broadcast, MAC-address checking and WPA2 personal. This has been working for the last 60+ mins. I get a 192.168. address and no longer get the self-assigned IP address. So if my fix is accurate, then whatever the issue was seems to related to firmware/802.11n/2.4Ghz spectrum networks. The 5Ghz so far works ok. But am continuing to see if it sticks.

It's likely been mentioned here before, but the wifi channel for 2.4 GHz makes a big difference if there are other wifi hubs nearby.

In our home setup, the wifi hub was configured to use channel 11 for 2.4 GHz. It turned out there were two other hubs nearby using the same channel. When I switched to another (unused) channel, the Macbook Air immediately went from being very slow to very fast on wifi.

You can detect the competing channels using airlock:

http://www.pimley.net/projects/#airlock

Once you have confirmed whether you are in competition for a channel, just change to an unused channel if this is a problem.

Note that older Macbook Pros didn't seem to be nearly as sensitive to this channel interference as the Macbook Air appears to be.

I wonder if PC ultra books are as ridiculously finnicky when it comes to wifi... Somehow I doubt it

Same here.

three weeks ago I got my super-doper MBA special edition with I7- 512Gb SState HD and 8 Gb memory.

In Dubai no problem.

In Switzerland cannot connect. I upgraded Mountan Lion yesterday and there is no difference.

The only notable thing is that if I turn bluetooth off it gets better.

Speedtest.net shows 10 Mbps with bluetooth off (the correct bandwidth I have here) and with  BTooth on it drops to 1 Mb.   I cannot believe this.

No noticeable changes with Mountan Lion then.

I will change it to a MacBook pro.

Ciao

Maybe it's because of different WiFi channels?

USA only allows channels 1-11, while EU allows 1-13 and Japan 1-14.

I got my MBA in the US and later had troubles connecting to my parents WiFi in Sweden.

Turned out their router was set to channel 13. I picked a lower channel and the problems disappeared.