Wifi Constantly Dropping in Lion

I had serious problems with wifi after mountain line upgrade. I could only connect for a few seconds. Even ethernet cable did not solve problem. After many hours, here is what worked. It turns out that my airport extreme was being overridden by my cable modem/router. The modem was generating a private ISP and airport extreme was acting as a bridge. This was no problem at all with previous OS, but mountain line will not allow this. I called my ISP, Bright House, and from their office they reset my cable modem to bridge mode. Then, I went into airport utilities, network, and deselected the bridge option and instead seleced DHCP and NAT. After rebooting the cable modem and airport extreme, everything worked great. I knew it was an in-house problem because wifi was working great during a recent road trip. I may not be explaining all of this to the satisfaction of the technical folks, but now I have fast, reliable wifi.

semspeaker wrote:

I had serious problems with wifi after mountain line upgrade. I could only connect for a few seconds. Even ethernet cable did not solve problem. After many hours, here is what worked. It turns out that my airport extreme was being overridden by my cable modem/router. The modem was generating a private ISP and airport extreme was acting as a bridge. This was no problem at all with previous OS, but mountain line will not allow this. I called my ISP, Bright House, and from their office they reset my cable modem to bridge mode. Then, I went into airport utilities, network, and deselected the bridge option and instead seleced DHCP and NAT. After rebooting the cable modem and airport extreme, everything worked great. I knew it was an in-house problem because wifi was working great during a recent road trip. I may not be explaining all of this to the satisfaction of the technical folks, but now I have fast, reliable wifi.

This is a great illustration of how some peoples problems are not "the apple problem"! Without seeing the exact settings before, and after, it's hard to guess what was going wrong. It sounds like there may have been two different devices doing DHCP, and your computer may have been handed an invalid address.

If this is happening to others, you might check your router, and see what it sees as it's WAN address vs what IP address your computer is using when WiFi is working, vs when it is not working. If you see a different "address", or "network" (different first 3 values, XXX, YYY and ZZZ in the XXX.YYY.ZZZ.UUU address), when it is working vs not working, then perhaps you have a duel routing issue, as this appears to be.

I consider it apple's problem when their software forces me to change my hardware settings just to make this upgraded mac work when everything else including a none up graded mac work fine just fine without any changes.

I just reinstalled ML and we'll see if that works. My next try will be a usb modem.

gsspike wrote:

I consider it apple's problem when their software forces me to change my hardware settings just to make this upgraded mac work when everything else including a none up graded mac work fine just fine without any changes.

I just reinstalled ML and we'll see if that works. My next try will be a usb modem.

We can have all kinds of arguments about whose at fault, and if that's all you are worried about, then you should just get on the phone with Apple and chew them out, instead of being on this user forum, which is not a support path for Apple's products.

In the end, WiFi is just another kind of "wire" to get packets from point A to point B. If your equipment is not capable of receving the packets, sent by Apple products, or it can't send packets which Apple products can use, reliably, then it might be something you get to deal with, like it or not.

I think there is, in fact, some work Apple needs to do, to either improve error handling, or at least use a "more linient" mechanism to downgrade your connection to use a configuration that will work.

There are lots of people not having problems. There are lots of people only have problems with particular types of equipment (brand or technology). If you don't want to know about how to manage the issues to minimize your lost time and money, then go sit in the corner and hold you hands over your ears and chant "la la la la la" louldly. That will likely not result in any problem being solved, but, if that's what you prefer, then go ahead, be apart of the problem and don't worry about the problem being solved, cause it never will if that's all everyone did.

Apple has no interest in providing support out in the open on this forum, it would be admitting to the world that there is a problem, like there are many other problems with software and hardware of any kind, doing it here will just provide a window into the sausage factory. The least Apple could do is read what people are writing here and provide a fix, it's obvious there is a problem with their software/hardware.

gphonei wrote:

There are lots of people not having problems. There are lots of people only have problems with particular types of equipment (brand or technology).

then there's people like me that have the same problem no matter where they go or what hardware they use.

including an AirPort Express.

so my overpriced Apple router is incompatible with my Apple computer? sounds legit.

DRW9 wrote:

gphonei wrote:

There are lots of people not having problems. There are lots of people only have problems with particular types of equipment (brand or technology).

then there's people like me that have the same problem no matter where they go or what hardware they use.

including an AirPort Express.

so my overpriced Apple router is incompatible with my Apple computer? sounds legit.

Okay, I'll say this again. Some people do, in fact have the "Apple WiFi Problem" where they can not get any kind of WiFi connection to work. Some people have problems related to their equipment or configuration or broken router firmware, come here, and suddenly believe they have the "Apple WiFi Problem", because well, their WiFi doesn't work.

I'm just trying to suggest that there are perhaps many people who can solve their problem without just standing around and saying "Apple fix my problem", because they don't have the "Apple WiFi Problem".

I'm sorry yours doesn't work anywhere. Have you tried turning on the WiFi debugging? If not, you might try that, and then when it fails, go look in the wifi log file to see what "disconnected". It might make it much more obvious what you need to talk to Apple about fixing.

If you can't do that, then I don't know how to suggest for you to get help by posting here.

I had all of the reported issues with my WiFi after upgrading to Lion, and I tried every suggestion on the first few pages of this thread. I found the fix in another thread, and thought it could help some of you out.
I logged in to my wireless router, and went to the wireless settings. The default channel it was using was "1". Many people found success by changing theirs to either channel 6 or 11. Mine didn't give me an option for 11, so I selected 6, and this fixed it!!!! Apparently there are 12 channels to choose from in most routers, and Apple supports about 4 of those channels. Channels 6 and 11 are supported (not sure what the other 2 channels are), but try changing the channel to 6 or 11. It fixed my problem.

Hi guys.

I was having problems with constant disconnections. It would appear as if I was connected but internet pages and pings would time out.

I tried lots of the solutions on this thread and nothing worked. Upgraded to ML and the problem persisted.

Today I solved the problem. I have 2 Apple Laptops and 1 Windows desktop on the same network. for some reason the windows machine was causing all the devices to lose their connection periodically. Once I turned the PC's wireless off everything started working flawlessly again. Not sure if this is just an isolated case or if this will work for anyone else.

I suspect I need to reinstall the drivers for the Windows machine but I will look in to that another time.

Good luck!

misskels wrote:

Today I solved the problem. I have 2 Apple Laptops and 1 Windows desktop on the same network. for some reason the windows machine was causing all the devices to lose their connection periodically. Once I turned the PC's wireless off everything started working flawlessly again. Not sure if this is just an isolated case or if this will work for anyone else.

I suspect I need to reinstall the drivers for the Windows machine but I will look in to that another time.

This is a very interesting report. It would be great if you could post any additional information that you find back here to update us on what you find was the root cause of the windows machine seeming to disable the network. Did you connect the problem PC with a wire and everything still work okay?

Hello, Ive been having drop outs sinces last year with my macbook air, ever since I bought it. Nothing ever worked for me, constantly turn off and then on airport for the macbook to connect correctly. Anyway... Saturday, I installed Mountain Lion, to give it a go. Believe it or not, now my macbook air wakes up and connects straight to the network and all works perfectly fine now! So must have been something with Lion, as I have had the same problem with any router I connect to, but only problems with macbook air, my macbook pro works fine anywas on Lion. I thought Id mention this to everyone. Try out Mountain Lion as its sorted my problems out

So far my wifi dropping problem seems to be gone after a week of Mountain Lion, fingers crossed.

The Wi-Fi would just drop out randomly when my iPhone would be working, my iPad would be working, it was the Wi-Fi on the iMac dropping out, the operating system then was lion.

My WIFI dropping problem is gone after a week of Mountain Lion too.

After having the WIFI issue (tested repeatedly on all releases of Lion & never happening on Snow Leopard) I have not once had a WIFI subsystem dropout/crash - and that's with long, continued use over the course of about 1 week.

This would never happen with (plain) Lion and so I'm prepared to declare this problem fixed, for me.

It was fixed on my fresh Lion installed partition which I upgraded to Mountain Lion.

And it's also fixed on my Snow Leopard installation which I upgraded to Mountain Lion.

I had no problems upgrading to Mountain Lion whatsoever.

It might be worth mentioning, that part of the installation was to upgrade the firmware for the sake of the "internet-recovery feature". I let that install too.

So, it took 1 year... I feel like throwing a "bug-fix" party.

Glad to hear Mountain Lion has fixed it for some folks. I was only able to fix the problem by downgrading back to Snow Leopard, and I am very nervous to upgrade to Mountain Lion. But maybe after a few more updates I will give it a try.

@eROCK1

Changing the channel from 1 to 11 seemed to fix my today's wifi-troubles. I am using a time capsule in bridge mode to extend my network and it worked well. Having updated from Lion to Mountain Lion I changed the channel to 1. I never thought that channel 1 might cause a problem - blaming it on Mountain Lion.

The signal of channel 11 is quite weak. My iPhone is constantly losing connection. Maybe I should try channel 6?

Does anyone have an explanation for the channel 6 / 11 thing with Apple routers?