Wifi Constantly Dropping in Lion

Whoah whoah whoah there. How is replacing the router a reasonable solution? Is a person supposed to replace every router at every place they visit? At the airport? At a coffe house in Amsterdam? In a hotel in the Philippines? Please. Just stop with the nonsense. Let's find a real solution to this.

And yes, it is a real downer to have to deal with stupid wifi problems when wandering about the planet. Utterly negative.

secpro wrote:

Whoah whoah whoah there. How is replacing the router a reasonable solution? Is a person supposed to replace every router at every place they visit? At the airport? At a coffe house in Amsterdam? In a hotel in the Philippines? Please. Just stop with the nonsense. Let's find a real solution to this.

And yes, it is a real downer to have to deal with stupid wifi problems when wandering about the planet. Utterly negative.

I don't know if you remember or not, but prior to there being a "WiFi" organization, there were countless wireless implementations that were sold as a router, and a USB radio that would only talk to that brand of router. The standards are an important part of interworking. 802.11n has specific requirements as does 802.11b/802.11g interworking. A lot of the router companies have chose to use something well known, like the WRT, open source projects implementation for their products. Others, have rolled their own. Software can and will have bugs.

Apple's software has bugs. In this particular case, the bug is most likely in the WiFi driver handling and reacting to interfering signals from either bad WiFi implementations, or strong RF signals that swamp the receiver on your WiFi radio and cause it to "drop" the connection since it can't decode anything from the AP. But, that's just my guess.

Buying a new router, as I've stated elsewhere, could only solve the problem, if it was the original AP that had a problem, or if you changed to 802.11N on 2.4ghz or 5ghz, and that removed or camoflaged the interferring signal/pattern.

Radio is not simple. Software for 802.11 is not simple. I think Apple will most likely drop a .5 update to Lion soon, but may just delay, and include any proposed fix into Mountain Lion. But, we'll just all get to wait and see, either way.

I have tried everything in this and other forums on the Internet the last two weeks since I upgraded it lion. To day I just turned of the sleeping mode on my old MacBook, and the Internet is working perfectly. I use my computer on my desk with the power connected anyway, so I dont don't need to save power. However, the screen is still going into sleeping mode as it used to.

The only reason there are "signal" problems is because Apple is not managing the power-management in the wifi chipset. The broadcom chips universally have the same power management issues and it is up to the OS to work around it. Apple is refusing to do so (rightly so actually) and here we are with Apple denying there is a problem and apparently nobody posting an actual solution. I do have to wonder if there have been posts that actually solved it but were removed for PR reasons.

Tell me what it is like in 3 days from now. Are the problems back? I bet they are. I get a few days of connectivity sometimes when I find something new to change in power management. Wish I could find the button to turn the power management off on the wifi chipset. It would solve all of these stupid problems. You can not even BUY a program that does it. ***?

Tokva, after reading your post yesterday, I changed my sleep mode in my Imac, so far I have not had any problem!

I hope this continues!

I have tried this with my MBP, it looks like a fix for me. Not one that I like as I would like power managment, and I don't see why Apple would be refusing to make a fix as it's their OS to the end user and I personally couldn't care less about Broadcom's issues, I just want working OSX.

secpro; it's still working for me.

Also, still working for me.

It is very nice not to have the connecting problem.

This is even worce than Lion was. What the He!! do they bata test these things on.

Anyone with this issue install Mountain Lion?

I have had the problem for months with a 2 year old iMac and I finally downgraded it back to Snow Leopard (which fixed the wifi issues immediately).

Of course, I would love to be using some of the new OS X features if I could just be online reliably too.

Anyone have anything to report?

You might want to do a search because this is affecting even those that didn't have a problem with lion.

I upgraded to Mountain Lion 16 days ago, same problems with wifi.

After 3 days I filed a bug report and was given instructions to enable debugging and get logs, since enabling debugging it's worked fine and is still working fine (it could be a coincidence but I doubt it because before it wouldn't even last 3 hours or 20 mins when playing media from network.. or 10 seconds if I tried to copy files on wifi).

I've just reinstalled today to fix SSH, so I'll see what happens with wifi this time.

anyone that does have issues: try enabling debugging with this command:

sudo /usr/libexec/airportd debug +alluserland +alldriver +allvendor +LogFile

or you can replace IO80211Family.kext with the one from Snow Leopard.

Having the same problem when coming back to my computer after being away for more than a certain amount of time. Never had this problem before upgrading to mountain lion.

Another wifi drop victim here. thinking about returning my brand new rMBP within the 14 day window with this as the reason. pretty ridiculous that something as simple as WiFi connectivity is plagueing brand new hardware and software. I for the life of me cannot understand how this kind of thing isnt simply fixed in a day at a place like Apple. Still optimistic for a patch and love the machine otherwise, so not quite willing to give up yet....