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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

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968 replies

Mar 16, 2011 3:04 AM in response to Strange Dream

Hi,

I've noticed similar behavior - specifically with the new 2011 MacBook Pro 13 and 17" models (tested) on Cisco infrastructure - using a 1252 and 3500i/e series APs running in dual-band mode, with 5GHz preferred. I've seen the transfer rates when in close proximity to the AP move between 72mbit and 243 - occasionally 300. My 2010 system in the same position is a solid, dependable 300.

They did modify the wireless chipset in the new 2011 MacBook Pros to replace it with a true 3x3 802.11n device. Cisco have long praised the Broadcom chipsets so I will see if their wireless team can advise me on what this new gear is capable of.

I currently look after a very large deployment of wireless LAN equipment so my wireless performance is absolutely critical to my work - the 2010 system was a godsend and a testament to how wireless devices should be built. It looks to me like this could be a software issue so I only hope Apple resolves this ASAP. I'll hang on to my 2010 system for now...

Mar 16, 2011 12:40 PM in response to LaraJones

I have a 2011 MBP 2.2 and get perfectly good wifi reception at home with my airport extreme. At the moment, I'm in a library with some other router and keep losing my connection. And when it does connect, it's quite slow, though the RSSI is -49. Everything works perfectly with my iPad, so something is wrong with the software driving the MBP's Airport. Hope they fix it.

Mar 16, 2011 3:56 PM in response to clueblast

I've been troubleshooting this issue with Apple for about a week now. I have a ticket open with them that we've escalated to engineering.

It seems to be happening on all the new MacBook Pro's. I've had mine replaced twice already and we were able to reproduce the problem on every new MacBook Pro they have on display at the apple store.

It is currently suspected that their is probably a bug in the AirPort card's Firmware since we've tested with older MacBook's with the same OS and hardware with the only difference being the AirPort firmware on the older MacBook's is 5.10 and the new MacBook Pro's have 5.100

I have been sending them diagnostic information which has been sent to Engineering for a fix.

They are supposed to get back to me early next week with their findings.

new macbook pro 2011 weak and dropping wireless connection

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