Q: WiFi Issues With MacBook Air

Just be prepared. This is what is going to happen.

They will of course not be able to reproduce the issue in the store. (They make **** sure they use only apple networking hardware, etc etc yada yada so everything is perfect for their products). They will basically throw their hands up and say without reproducing it there's nothing they can do. Catch 22 eh. Been over this numerous times with various issues.

I wish I had done the research before buying this MacBook Air 1.7/8/250 3 weeks ago. I can connect to wifi but pages do not load else drop out. I am in Hong Kong so have to eat the 15% restocking fee even though I bought it direct from Apple store. I won't bother with the Genius Bar. I have been down that road and they are program to say "it must be your router". I have 3 other Macbook Pros and iPads iPhones and iPods spans they work perfectly.

Despite all research suggesting that the way to higher profits is through employee or customer satisfaction (pick your order), Apple is still clearly 'old school' as it is only their stakeholders that they are interested.  I don't say this lightly.  The macnn story itself clearly states that Apple has known about this since last summer, and yet their employees try to make it the customer's fault, and waist hours of our time trying to fix what cannot be fixed.  They actually wanted me to tell the University I was working out of to change all their routers to apple routers - a new level of arrogance.  Perhaps I will need to find a way, now that we know that they knew about their problem all along, for me to recover all my lost time, as well as money in running back and forth to their 'experts'.

IT IS YOUR ROUTER, only if you tried everything ELSE and failed to fix it.

I had intermittent wifi connectivity issues on my 2009 iMac ever since I "allowed" Comcast to send me an Xfinity Arris modem. I used to have a fine linksys wifi access point, thatI shutdown in favor of this !@#@ Arris wifi. And that is when the problems began- as I just realized today.

I called Comcast to turn the router into a bridge, and shutdown its wifi. I went back to my linksys access point and now I DO NOT have the wifi issue.

My iMac's wifi is working great as before. I was inclined to blam the Artheros firmware, but thats not it. It is the Arris firmware. To h** with them.

So just an update and what is so far working for me.  Due to the power management of this particular device (2010 late model MBA) the wifi card driver forces it to operate at such a low level of power consumption that it quickly drops connectivity.  I noticed that I never lost connectivity when I was downloading or streaming a video.  In order to maintain the card's power level for continutiy, you must keep it busy.  What I am currently using as a solution is to run a ping command to Google.  It hasn't failed yet.  You could ping your own router instead if you wanted to, I suppose, but if you open Terminal and type: "ping www.google.com" (minus the quotes for the newer folks) and just let that run in the background, it will ping the google servers once a second and will more than likely be enough to keep your wifi card alive for casual surfing and use.  At least it has been for me.  You will notice a slight increase in power drainage though, but in the case of the 2010 MBA, the battery sucked anyway.  I hope that this may help. 

Just an update.  I've had better success pinging my own router or a google DNS address (8.8.8.8) ever 2 milliseconds.  Currently I'm running the following script in terminal: ping -i 0.2 10.0.0.1 (becuase that's my router - you insert your own router IP instead of mine).  Or replace the 10.0.0.1 with google's 8.8.8.8, etc. 

I bought my Macbook Air in 2013, had heard about these problems affecting connectivity before purchasing, but of course the salesperson at Best Buy said they had never had anyone return theirs for this issue and it worked perfectly in the store. This solution seems to be the one that makes sense and finally worked for me!

...and now it is starting to get spotty again and in looking at the Terminal I see this "request timeout for icmp_seq " and then a number following that which differs each time. Sigh.....it was too good to be true, but it works more often than not for now.

Mine drops occasionally as well. Play with your ping interval setting. Mine is generally pretty solid at 0.2. Results may vary though. I'm using a Broadcom 43xx wireless chipset. 0.2 stabilizes it well.

The problem seems to be that with the current power management settings inherent to the MBA, the chipset isn't providing enough "waking" power at a high enough interval to keep the connection alive. It's probably either a kernel or a driver issue. Either way, it *****.

Possible solution.

My symptoms on my MBA were that after sleeping the wifi icon would scan but not connect to my home router. Tried different routers and location as well as Macos re install

Online chat with apple tech provided this solution which seems to be working so far

Ensure that  your energy saver settings for display sleep is LONGER than your screen saver activation timer.

Restart after adjusting energy saver control panel setting.

I have a one year old Mac Air and the wireless issues have been driving me nuts. All the wireless devices in my home office work well except the Mac Air.  It has a weak signal and drops totally off causing me to have to turn wireless off and back on to see my wireless connections. After reading about issues, I used the wireless utility to see the signal strength. It was marginal, logging between good and poor.  Turning off my Bluetooth, causes the wireless reception to improve about 20 percent.  In an overnight test, the wireless stayed connected all night when the Bluetooth is off. However, I cannot leave Bluetooth off; I have a Bluetooth keyboard and Magic Mouse.

Solution - Ordered a BO-N1557 Boise wireless USB receiver. The utility that came with the software reports signal strength of 90 to 100 percent.  My wireless is faster and never disconnects. The Mac driver came with it on a disk.   I see this as a major Apple issue but one thing I have learned is that Apple pays no attention to these support blogs and goes their own way. I love the Air, iPod, and iPhone but they could be even better if Apple had ears and made changes as a result.

Well done dcssteve. The problem for me is that I have nowhere near your level of computer literacy, so don't really even understand what it is you bought that is the solution. I just expect things to work once I have paid my money and dutifully followed all of the instructions. This has been successful in the past in ensuring I can use a computer without having to understand the intricacies of its engineering. It's only recently that it seems that my Mac (an Air) can't communicate with - maybe  - my router. Yet my iPhone and iPad seem to have no problems with the router.

I have had years of using Macs with very few problems until Mavericks. I have now tried every tip on this forum (that I can understand). Even had some Apple techs trying to help, although they dropped me after a while. Used up hours of time with no result. From reading this forum it seems that I am not alone. I would hate to know how many man/woman hours have been wasted as people tried to resolve this issue. I suspect millions. Maybe this is why the US is still not really out of the recession - too many workers spending too much time trying to get their Macs to connect with the internet. Once this problem is solved watch the GDP zoom up!

The USB Wireless is a small device that plugs into one of the USB ports. Once the driver is installed from the disk, it can take over wireless bypassing the Mac builtin wireless interface. Some configuration is required. It worth the work to rid yourself of the Mac Air wireless issues. The Air may work alright if you can turn off your Bluetooth without the USB wireless interface but that is a severe penalty.

This problem should not exist with a primarily wireless portable - bad engineering and poor problem correction form Apple.

Here is a link to the device on amazon

http://www.amazon.com/Bolse®-300Mbps-Wireless-N-Micro-Adapter/dp/B00DTZYHX4/ref= sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1403550367&sr=8-1&keywords=boise+bo-n1557

Thanks a lot for your response DCSSTEVE - I have been away for few weeks, and just got back online. Strangely, everything is working well so far this evening. But this has also happened in the past, so I don't really expect it to last for long. But weird that it happens at all as a result of occasional non-use.

And to your suggestions - I never (well, hardly ever) use Bluetooth on my Mac, and have had it turned off for most of the time I have used the computer, so it isn't that. I will look into the USB Wireless gadget and if other reports/reviews indicate the same success as you have had I will buy one to get rid of the headaches, as it is only a few dollars.