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LaraJones Author

Level 1

0 points

new macbook pro 2011 weak and dropping wireless connection

Just looked throught this part of the forum and found out there are a lot of people out there which seem to have the same problem as me.

I purchased a new modell 2011 MBP on the very first day from our apple store.
At home, sitting directly beside the wireless router I didn´t noticed anything wrong.
I have got beside of the Mac OS a bootcamp Prt. with Windows 7 on it and everythign works fine so far.

Five days after purchased I started traveling on business and at present we are for some weeks in Melbourne. Were having a wireless connection in our appartement and here I have got massiv problems with my connection.

We are having altogether four windows mashines with us, my IPad, my Iphone, another HTC smartphone, and my new Macbook.

All the other devices connecting to our room wireless without problems. The net strengh is not fantastic but the other devices bringing it up to four bars on the windows wireless symbol in the task bar. None of the other computers where ever loosing the connection.

Only my macbook can not make it over three bars and its going on and off. Donwloads fail freuquently because the conection is interrupted more than one times..
In my opinion this problem is even worse on the Windows OS and a bit better but far away from beeing good and acpetable on the Mac Os.
I hope its only a driver issue and there is no hardware problem with the new mashine. Other than this I love the new notebook and I am very satisfied with its performance.

Iphone 4, Ipad 1 ,Macbook pro 13, I 5, 8GB, early 2011, Windows 7, Mac OS

Posted on Mar 8, 2011 9:00 PM

968 replies

Mar 23, 2011 2:37 PM in response to LaraJones

New 2011 15" Macbook Pro, last week.

Trouble since the first night I got it home, connecting to any wifi network (both in OS X and Win7). Have tried everything I can find, removed all keychains (this doesn't affect Windows), have reset the PRAM and SMC. Changed and tried all number of settings on my router (I don't even see why I SHOULD have to do this). Still having trouble, no other machines or devices I have get any trouble connecting to my network, or the networks around here.

Only this machine. Sometimes it does work, but not for long, the connection will drop and won't re-connect. As far as I am concerned (I'm a technical engineer at an IT support company, I pretty much know what I'm doing), its either a hardware or firmware fault with the WiFi card. Now, this is the first Macbook Pro I have owned, so I'm just looking for a bit of guidance.

Return to the Apple store for a replacement? Wait for a firmware update? I understand that the WiFi card is proprietary ( Broadcom BCM4331 ), is it replaceable with another vendor? Will the Apple store just provide me with a new card, and I can swap that in-store?

Unsure what I should do, this is the only problem I have with this machine.

DrVenture

Level 2

180 points

Mar 23, 2011 4:57 PM in response to Noman84

Noman84,

Turn up airport debugging on the MacBookPro the next time you cannot connect to a WiFi hotspot. Most hotspots run with OPEN+NO encryption with a Web portal Authentication/Backend, so really I would be surprised if your MBP cannot connect to that type of network.

Anyway, to turn up airport logging in Snow Leopard open a terminal and issue the following command:

sudo /usr/libexec/airportd debug +AllUserland +AllDriver +AllVendor

Note the time, then reproduce the issue.

Go to the kernel.log and post the entries from about 2 minutes before you reproduced the issue to about 2 minutes after.

To get to your kernel.log you can use the console app in utilities. Look in /var/log

To turn off airport logging issue the following in a terminal window:

sudo /usr/libexec/airportd debug -AllUserland -AllDriver -AllVendor

Lets start with that and see what we can see.

Noman84

Level 1

1 points

Mar 23, 2011 6:52 PM in response to DrVenture

Any instructions for debugging the issue for Windows 7 ?

... the service center ran diagnostics on the MBP twice and told me everything is working ... and I know ppl with this issue have contacted an authorized service center and / or a genius and were told that its working ... there are several posts with the logs posted and latency tests (ping delays) posted everywhere, refer to this thread for pings and other details on the issue, there are other threads also:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2772174&tstart=0

Message was edited by: Noman84

LaraJones Author

Level 1

0 points

Mar 23, 2011 10:35 PM in response to Noman84

No news from my side, but I am very glad to know in the meantime ( alone 48 posts here in my thread about a wlan issue on the new Macbook pro 2011!

)that I am not the only one and that I am not just too stupid to connect a Macbook to the network...where all our other divices are running without any problems.

Still same issue! Macbook has got trouble with the weak net. I think, the reason why there are not many more complains might be, that the problem is not occuring when you have got a very strong net. I did not have any trouble at all at home in Germany sitting nearly beside of our router with a full blast of a 32 MB Wlan connection.
Here in our hotel wlan the conection is much slower and weaker. BUT as I said, the other devices as four different Windows Mashines, my Ipad and Iphone and the HTC of my husband are able to connect on that net without trouble. Its slow and weak but it works for the other ones. Only my Macbook gets thrown out frequently. I have to restart the wireless adapter to get a connection from time to time, than it works for a while and than its gone again.... Very very unsatisfieng with a brandnew notebook. I will try if I can get the update working now...but I have my doubts...on this connction level at present, downloading anything is a mission impossible.

dmallo

Level 1

0 points

Mar 24, 2011 1:59 AM in response to LaraJones

I found something.

Kernel log extract:

Mar 24 09:32:25 MacBook-kernel[0]: wl0: Beacon Loss Event
Mar 24 09:32:25 MacBook-kernel[0]: AirPort: Link Down on en1. Reason 4 (Disassociated due to inactivity).

Since I have seen this, I am connected with some artificial traffic and no more suddenly connection drops (for 20 minutes at least).

Maybe is a power management bug :S

There is another mensage that concern me at Airport switch on:

Mar 24 09:26:01 MacBook-Pro-de-Diego-M kernel[0]: en1: setting diversity to: -1
Mar 24 09:26:01 MacBook-Pro-de-Diego-M kernel[0]: en1: Error configuring antenna diversity (index = -1).
Mar 24 09:26:01 MacBook-Pro-de-Diego-M kernel[0]: en1: setting tx antenna: -1
Mar 24 09:26:01 MacBook-Pro-de-Diego-M kernel[0]: en1: Error configuring transmit antenna (index = -1).

Could be another bug?

yozhbk

Level 1

8 points

Mar 24, 2011 3:47 AM in response to dmallo

This is good I was thinking power management issues early on but dismissed it. I`m wondering what is that second error ?

psaraiva

Level 1

0 points

Mar 24, 2011 10:37 AM in response to LaraJones

I'm also suffering from this issue. Initially I had a lot of disconnections and low speed, but after I changed the channel in the router configuration, the disconnections are now rare. The connection speed however, it's slow (200Kb/s) but a least I can surf the web. I'm going to try linux on the machine to see if is a hardware problem or an driver issue.

Arzenal

Level 1

0 points

Mar 24, 2011 11:27 AM in response to LaraJones

I was standing at my computer, typing on iChat, with uTorrent running in the background, and the signal dropped.

For some reason the wifi chip just times itself out completely randomly, even with a program designed to use internet nonstop running in the background

wifiguru

Level 2

240 points

Mar 24, 2011 12:02 PM in response to Arzenal

What wireless router are you using and are you seeing these drops frequently ?
Everyone who complains here needs to at the very minimum, post their Wireless Router make and firmware version's so if there is a trend with a particular make/model it's easy to figure out.

Have you also tried changing channels and using a less congested channel ? Have you checked if your router is running the latest firmware version ?

yozhbk

Level 1

8 points

Mar 24, 2011 12:04 PM in response to wifiguru

Dual Band Apple AirPort Base Station 7.5.2

Arzenal

Level 1

0 points

Mar 24, 2011 12:43 PM in response to wifiguru

I am running on an Airport Extreme Base Station that has worked flawlessly for a year. I had an early 2008 Black Macbook that I sold to buy this new Early 2011 Macbook Pro and it never dropped its wifi connection ever.

Taking Macbook Pro to Apple Store tonight, Im sure they won't be able to reproduce the issue.

Mar 24, 2011 12:45 PM in response to LaraJones

BT HomeHub 2.0 fw: 8.1.H.J (Type A) - Tried: none, WEP, WPA, WPA2

Have tried a number of different routers, I'll get those in a bit.

Note: I have also re-installed OS X and Win7 twice.

Noman84

Level 1

1 points

Mar 24, 2011 1:58 PM in response to wifiguru

Everything else ... even 4-5 year old laptops connect just fine ... IMHO i do not think this can be a router issue. Also, how do you go about determining which router / firmware they have at the hotel / restaurant you want to connect to WiFi on ? ... also, when you connect an external USB Wifi device to the MBP it connects to the same network (and the same router) just fine.

Even older Macbooks with the latest version of OS X connect without any issues and MBP 2011 refuses to connect or drops out.

Trying to connect on Windows 7 is even worse, its probably a hardware / driver / positioning of the NIC issue. The issue happens for open / unsecured / unencrypted networks as well.

The Wireless card by Broadcom that is used in the new MBPs is relatively new and possibly not well tested, I can only hope its only a driver issue and not a hardware / device issue.

yozhbk

Level 1

8 points

Mar 24, 2011 2:10 PM in response to Noman84

Im starting to think that it is a hardware issues. Also its posible that its a bad batch of cards. I wonder if there are people who dont have issues, but its hard to access as they wouldnt come here. Also since it is an issues randomly people might not notice right away. If it is just an issue with card they can replafe the card i guess.

toabi

Level 1

0 points

Mar 24, 2011 2:54 PM in response to LaraJones

I found out a funny thing. Don't know if it this normal but:

Ping times are jumping around like crazy. If signal is weak there are timeouts and ping time goes up to a few seconds.

time=70.990 ms
time=197.233 ms
time=118.374 ms
time=40.085 ms
…

If I open a second Terminal window and there start a

sudo ping -i 0.2 airport.local

the ping time is <1ms and the time in the first opened window goes down too!

In places where the signal is bad this also shows effect. Not to <1ms - but noticeably. I didn't try it long enough to see if the timeouts and connection interruptions are not occuring while constantly pinging the router in short intervals. I'm also no expert in WiFi/Networking so this all could mean nothing.

I'm just a bit annoyed that my new device has some weird issues.

new macbook pro 2011 weak and dropping wireless connection