Wifi Constantly Dropping in Lion

Big Red Dog wrote:

My MacPro, which is Ethernet hardwired to my Linksys router, drops the Internet connection just as often as my MacBook does. For the MacBook, I only need to turn off the WiFi and turn it back on and I'm good to go for about another 24 hours.

For my MacPro, however, a computer restart has been the only way to re-acquire Internet (WAN) access.

It is worth noting that I do not ever lose connection to the router. The LAN is always up; each Mac can see all devices on my LAN (about 10 of them). Both Macs can access the admin page on the router easily. Only the WAN is shut down.

That sounds like an ISP problem if the Mac's can access the router then. You might try my quick hack script on your router, in one terminal window and then use COMMAND-N to open another terminal window and ping an external address. See if they report different information at different times. If it's a Lion problem, they'd both report a problem at the same time, indicating that Lion's networking has stopped working.

THANKS !

Pinging anything on the WAN (WWW), such as Google, is fine. I don't really have the need to specify the IP address of my ISP. I will use you code as written and let you know what I discover after a couple of hours of pinging.

I have never lost (LAN) communications with the router, as some people have reported. I've only lost connection through my DNS to the rest of the world. But you do make a good suggestion ... I will try the local pinging as well just to make sure.

I am at the point of losing it...this problem has been occurring ever since I bought my new iMac with Lion

and I connect to an Apple Airport Extreme. My iMac is the only machine in my house with any problems.

I've downloaded and installed the "patch", but my connection seems to drop even more frequently.

I even tried just keeping a Remote Desktop connection open to one of my other boxes...

Arrrgghhh!!

C'mon, Apple, fix this...for real. I can't have an ethernet cable strung across my floor for folks to trip over.

Troubleshooting Wi-Fi issues in OS X Lion and Mac OS X v10.6

I have had WiFi problems for several months but as it turned out it wasn't a software (OS X lion) but a router problem.

It wasn't a connection loss with the router but the iMac lost connection to the internet.

Maybe my sollution is applicable for more OS X lion and iMac(intel) users.

Many routers can send a mixed WiFi signal like B,G and/or N.

The mid 2011 iMac can recieve both G and N WiFi signals but when a router switches all the time between G and N it gets "confused".

The sollution for my iMac:

My router was programmed to send a mixed WiFi signal (G and N ) on a mixed frequency (20 to 40 Mhz)

I changed that to a fixed N wifi signal and fixed frequency.

Further more I checked which WiFi channels my neigbours where using and changed mine into a channel that was at least 2 channels different than the one from my clossest neighbours.

I hope this will help some of you.

There is only one thing that I realy have to say.

The iCentre's here in Holland suck.

I have absolutly no confidence in their skils.

They tried to convince me that setting my IP adress on manual was responsible for this problem and charged me Euro 79,- to change that into an automatic IP adress because software issues aren't covered by the standard warrenty on a almost new iMac.

Last weekend Europes biggest Apple store in Amsterdam opened its doors and hopefully they will do a better job in the future.

Also I think that the people at Apple can do a much better job in providing sollutions even when it is not directly related to one of their products.

jpjmr,

Your problem is clearly NOT the same problem stated in this thread.

Most of us here used to enjoy a wifi connection and after an upgrade (several combinations of them) our Macs started to drop connections (again several symtoms) and/or failed to reconnect coming off sleep mode.

Thanks CT! My connection actually stayed up all night!

We'll keep monitoring it, but that guide seemed to do the trick.

Darn it, I knew it was too good to be true. My connection has started dropping again.

This is super frustrating.

Other ideas?

QJack wrote:

Darn it, I knew it was too good to be true. My connection has started dropping again.

This is super frustrating.

Other ideas?

Well I bought a new Time Capsule and everything is perfect now, and I'm enjoying 5Ghz (I was mixed b & g before).

Did you happen to use the same SSID when you created your new network with your new time capsule?

I'm wondering if somehow a new network name, or BSSID somehow fixes, or avoids the problem.

I make my living helping people with their computers, especially macs, and this problem really has me stumped...

WSR wrote:

QJack wrote:

Darn it, I knew it was too good to be true. My connection has started dropping again.

This is super frustrating.

Other ideas?

Well I bought a new Time Capsule and everything is perfect now, and I'm enjoying 5Ghz (I was mixed b & g before).

joe619 wrote:

Did you happen to use the same SSID when you created your new network with your new time capsule?

Indeed I did retain the same SSID and WPA2 password as I didn't want to go changing all my devices. Everything worked straight away and brilliantly... Much stronger, and of course no drop outs on my Lion MBPro.

I wanted a 2gb Time Capsule anyway, but the better wireless has been a bonus.

WSR wrote:

joe619 wrote:

Did you happen to use the same SSID when you created your new network with your new time capsule?

Indeed I did retain the same SSID and WPA2 password as I didn't want to go changing all my devices. Everything worked straight away and brilliantly... Much stronger, and of course no drop outs on my Lion MBPro.

I wanted a 2gb Time Capsule anyway, but the better wireless has been a bonus.

I have a new dual band Apple airport have have had the problems with several Lion machines (old and new machines, as well as Lion server and workstation).

The interesting thing is that I didn't have the problem on my macbook pro at first (which was upgraded from 10.6.x to Lion). But then I got a SSD and did a clean install of Lion to it, and thats when the problems happened. Interestingly, that's also when my imac seemed to start having problems running Lion as well. Before the fresh install on my macbook pro, both my macbook pro and imac worked fine.

I wonder if a new airport with a new BSSID would solve the problem, for my current machines running Lion. It seems that when people buy a new wireless router, the problem goes away... Just a theory/guess...

It's repeating stuff I wrote before, but to reiterate, I had a 2008 MB Pro on SL and it was fine for 3 years. Then I bought myself a late 2011 MBPro with SSD and Lion out of the box..... and it "broke" my network.

Not only did the new MB Pro drop out ad nauseum, but the 2008 one did too.... Funny enough my 2006 Mac Pro didn't (in same room as the wireless router) and nor did my iPad2 and iPod, irrespective of where they were in the house.

Buying the Time Capsule has been an instant and permanent fix as I turned off the wireless signall from my router and connected the TC by ethernet to it. The TC serves the Wi-Fi now and I've had no problems for the last 2 or 3 weeks.

It was dropping out every day before, maybe a dozen times or more. Sometimes turning Wi-Fi off & on the top Airport icon cleared it straight away.... sometimes not, and it needed to stay off for 5 mins and then be turned back on, and it would be ok for either a few seconds, or if I was lucky maybe a few hours.

WSR wrote:

Buying the Time Capsule has been an instant and permanent fix as I turned off the wireless signall from my router and connected the TC by ethernet to it. The TC serves the Wi-Fi now and I've had no problems for the last 2 or 3 weeks.

It was dropping out every day before, maybe a dozen times or more. Sometimes turning Wi-Fi off & on the top Airport icon cleared it straight away.... sometimes not, and it needed to stay off for 5 mins and then be turned back on, and it would be ok for either a few seconds, or if I was lucky maybe a few hours.

It is stories like these that really make me wonder if a new BSSID is what is fixing things. What puzzles me though, is how the computers are remembering the old BSSID even when doing a clean install (aka, formatting the hard drive, then installing). But even zapping the PRAM, etc, doesn't seem to fix it... This is definitely a very curious and annoying problem...

In fact, I find it so bad, that I can no longer recommend Mac's to my clients. If they had this problem with a new mac, it would seriously tarnish my reputation.

Yeah, I don't know about buying a new router and such...I have no problems except for the iMac. Both of my sons have MacBooks and they were upgraded from 10.6 and they seem to be doing fine.

Apple has to come up with a fix and quickly, because I too cannot recommend iMacs to my colleagues and clientele.