Wifi Constantly Dropping in Lion

Really Nice : ) ... Now I'm foolish, ignorant and uninformed.

As I've posted in this forum before, a $10.00 USB WIFI Adaptor has resolved the problem of my iMac consistently dropping an internet connection to a Verizon Mifi device.

I place these words in this forum for anyone who may google "Wifi Dropping Problem and Resolution." Many appear to be having the problem in this forum.

This solution works for my iMac system configured for a Verizon Mifi broadband router and service.

I am hopeful that this information will help others avoid endless and perhaps needless testing of solutions offered in this forum that did not resolve the problem for me.

If the problem was the access point why would it only affect computers running Lion but not Snow Leopard, Windows or ANY device not running Lion.

Same problem with ANY access point, whether it's a Buffalo n router, Netgear g router or AirPort Extreme in ANY location.

If your machine is like mine, the problem is in the wi-fi driver issued with Lion. It just doesnt work right on some older Macs (mine is a late 2009 iMac). Revert back to the wi-fi driver that came with Snow Leopard and all be be good again. Guaranteed. You will lose Air Drop but otherwise no issues and no other side-effects. I am at zero drops since March after reverting the driver. Before that constant dropping. I even put the new driver back to make sure that was really it and like clockwork the wi-fi drops come back.

Apple is lame to not issue a fix, thats true, but at least there is a very easy workaround that actually works. Its been mentioned many times on this board but I think some people are afraid to try it. Their loss. Its simple to back out if it doesnt work for you. See: http://rys.sommefeldt.com/2011/09/04/osx-lion-wifi.html.

I have a 2010 MacBook Pro which has a Broadcom card, I upgraded to Mountain Lion to see if it was fixed, it's not. I tried the Snow Leopard driver a week ago and it didn't work (it might work on Lion but I haven't tried downgrading yet).

But for some reason, since I enabled debugging (3 days ago) it's working fine, I doubt it's a coincidence as the last time it worked for more than 3 hours I was running Snow Leopard.

ok, it's working, I don't know what I did wrong last time.

How did you solve your problem? Buy a new Apple router even though all of your other devices work fine? Pay money to Apple to give you worthless tech support?

I am dying to know. How did you solve it? I would like a solution too and tens of thousands of people like it too.

Sorry I don't buy it... this is an OS issue. When I reboot into Snow Leopard it simply works. NO PROBLEM!

Same computer, same wi-fi, same everything except Snow Leopard instead of Lion! I cannot accept that it is not a Lion failure. YES!! WINDOWS WORKS!!! SNOW LEOPARD WORKS!! LEOPARD WORKS!!! THIS IS A FAILURE OF THE LION OS!!!

I solved my problem by hard wiring up the house with CAT-5. I got tired of waiting. I spent two weekends of crawling around in a hot attic. Connection speeds are now simply amazing. Wi-Fi is now only for the iPhones.

NO REGRETS for going hard wire... Except I can no longer unequivocally recommend Apple Computers to others. I've been a Mac Evangelist since 1990. An twelve year streak ended by this issue.

Mike

Still. Can't. Confirm.

You know what, Nevermind. No reason to even respond to your post.

Have a great day.

gphonei wrote:

Shootist007 wrote:

Billjacobson wrote:

... foolish? You have a nice way of making friends.

Yes foolish. If I had this problem on my Macbook Pro I would of returned it for another or a full refund and said goodbye to Mac and Apple.

You do know that they are not the only game in town.

Well, I don't think foolish is what you mean. I think that you mean uninformed, or ignorant. Most people having this problem just happen to have a poor quality AP which doesn't support the standards well, or a noisy WiFi environment where the AP keeps dropping connections. This is keeping some Macs from having their WiFi work correctly.

We have problems with people even being able to tell exactly what is "not working". Some people say that the wifi connection is up, but the internet is down. Some people say their wifi is broken. Some people say that their computer disconnects over and over.

In the end, I still contend that this is a problem with a noisy, bad WiFi radio within range of these peoples networks and it is creating enough noise to make the Mac WiFi radio malfunction. It could be a hardware design issue, it could be a software issue that made it visible in lion even though the hardware seemed to work fine with snow leopard.

People are in this forum, complaining to no avail. Apple doesn't list or suggest in anyway, this forum, as a form of support. People have called, taken their computers to the stores and done many things to get it fixed, but to no avail.

I still haven't heard if anyone has taken their computer and their router/AP away from the area where they've had problems to see if they still have problems someplace else (a family member or friends house, and plug your AP into their network) with the same radio on the other end. Has anyone done this? Would help to demonstrate whether the problem is with your "radio" in your computer, or if there are local radio transmissions which might be causing the problems. For local radio problems, some people do find that switching bands, or eliminating 802.11n and going to a slower, narrower band use, can fix the problem.

I wonder if we'll see the .5 update soon...

Actually, it is an issue that starts at the broadcom chipset level in the power management portion. You are correct that it is solvable through software. You are incorrect that it is a Lion issue since it first starting showing up after Tiger. Yes, really. That long ago. That many chipsets... just crazy.

@secpro

In my case, the issue was resolved with a new Apple router, although this wasn't the primary reason I bought it. I wanted to replace my Time Capsule becuase I ran out of backup space and if I was going to resort to external add-on storage I figured there was little point in a router with a built-in hard drive. More importantly I wanted a new Airport with the simultaneous dual band capability so I could provide full speed wifi for supported devices while still supporting those that don't support 5GHz likemy iPhone and PS3.

In any case, for some reason this also resolved my iMac's wifi issue. The issue never affected my MacBook Pro or other devices in the sam apartment. None of the other mentioned solutions worked for more than a day or so before the problem returned. My next steo would have been to take the iMac and router to an Apple store and let them figure it out, but the new router fixed everything.

Sorry, I know this isn't particularly helpful, but just wanted to sahre what worked and didn't work for me.

Well isn't that great. Any other device, even other Apple devices, connect to any router without a problem except Mac computers until you buy a Apple router.

Thank you for your response. It is disappointing though since if I were to implement that solution, it would only be a home solution. I would still have the same problems elsewhere.

People are experiencing this with Mac routers. It's not router specific although in some cases a replaced router fixes the issue. Not sure anyone here fully understands the root cause...

Unfortunately in my case it was an Apple router that fixed the problem as well. Though in my case I had an older Aiport Extreme in storage that I wasn't using that I hooked back up. So at least I didn't have to resort to buying a new router.