Wifi Constantly Dropping in Lion

gatorpilot wrote:

@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?

Most routers in the US, used to come shipped with the default channel of 6 set. So, everyone was on Channel 6, and the usability of WiFi was impacted when there were more than a handful of users close to each other. 802.11n and MIMO increases bandwidth by using multiple channels. So, channels 1, 6 and 11 are what you should use to keep from overlapping channels and having your signal interfere with two channels, or you having to deal with more users packets interfering with your WiFi. If you have poorer performance on one of those channels, than on another, then you'll probably find more people around you using that channel, creating interference. It may be something besides WiFi too. 2.4ghz allocations in the U.S., for FCC Part 15, are used by wireless phones, baby monitors, TV signal extenders and lots of other things. Some of the devices are quite nasty in the types of signals they generate.

Power output is the primary issue. The FCC says 1watt out of the antenna (with antenna gain/amplification) is max power allowed. Most WiFi is 200-300 milliwatts, or 0.2 to 0.3 watts because people are generally near the equipment, and safety is a consideration.

Some of the junk on the market can be putting out a full watt which will dwarf your WiFi signal, and thus make it harder for it to work reliably/effectively.

Antennas design also is important. A poor antenna system might make one end of the spectrum, or the other not work so well, because it is not wide enough bandwidth to do equally well on all frequencies. This is also one of the reasons why the manufacturers put Channel 6 in as the default. That puts it in the middle where the antenna sweet spot is.

Hi @gatorpilot

We're not referring to generic WIFI connection problems in this thread - at least I'm not - and most others aren't.

If you read back, you'll find reference to a persistent "WIFI dropout" problem, meaning the entire WIFI subsystem on Lion basically crashes and needs to be restarted. AppleTV can't connect, all WIFI is completely down.

In my case "Snow Leopard" never (not once) suffered this issue but as soon as I booted into Lion the WIFI subsystem would go down and nothing WIFI could be used until I restarted (off/on).

My discovery that Mountain Lion finally fixes the problem is a revelation to what is obviously a software bug that was never on Snow Leopard was persistent in all releases of Lion and is now finally "fixed" on Mountain Lion.

@delventhalz you probably shouldn't necessarily trust me. But just to be clear, I was in the same position as you.

I went back to Snow Leopard. I then "upgraded" Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion.

No problems with the upgrade - well, except 2 of my 8 email accounts that I had setup in Mail didn't appear, so I'll have to readd them.

I thought I should pass this on. Apple called me yesterday and they are following these threads. They told me that right now they are gathering data and they weren't calling me with a fix yet. They had me try different things others have recommended and then they would have me run some test and email it to them. Luckally my Mac kept dropping wifi while I was talking to them and using my Macbook without it going into sleep mode. .

Again they are taking it seriously, they are reading the threads. They are looking into what has worked for some people and not for others.

Now this is My advise, Post what you are trying, BUT Don't post that it's working for you until you test it for a day. Some are trying everything in every post and then they are disappointed that it didn't work and forget to change things back and that could lead to other issues down the road.

Again don't post it worked for you because it didn't drop wifi for a few hours give it a day.

@furrytoes

It is good to know that some people are having their problem fixed by Mountain Lion. I will probably buy it for my laptop when it hits 10.8.1. Before I upgrade my iMac I will use my external HDD to create a bootable copy of the drive with Snow Leopard installed. If Mountain Lion causes issues I'm resetting that ************ to Snow Leopard that day.

Over a week now without a drop in wifi after installing Mountain Lion. I know it wasnt my airport express as it worked fine with my laptop on Snow Leopard and my iPad3 and iPhone 4s.

Fingers and toes still crossed.🙂

all I did was enable debugging and reboot (as requested by Apple Engineering)

I hadn't changed any settings on my access point or anything else on my network and it's been working fine 3 nearly 3 weeks.

Since then I've disabled debugging and installed Mountain Lion on top of my existing install to fix other issues and it's still fine.

This makes no sense to me, but that's what happened *shrug*.

Verizon Fios Actiontec router users only!

This is something that has been working for me since early Saturday.

I've passed it onto Apple. I know most of us has tried deleting our network setups with no luck.

Well this is what i did:

1: Deleted all networks and setting on my Mac again.

2: This time after that I did a Hard Reset of my router.

3: Rebooted my Mac

4: I then let our 2 Macs and Router set them selves up Automatically.

5: I left all settings to the default settings including Network name

6: Later I set my energy settings to deep sleep every 5 minutes.

This morning I decided to update my Onkyo receiver. I disconnected my router and moved it over to the receiver it needed to be hard wire connected to the receiver. The net worked fine there and when I put it back in the other room and connected to my PC every thing was still working wirelessly on our Macs.

I intentionally waited 2 days before I posted this and 36hrs before I passed it onto Apple.

I really don't know if this is just a fluke or if it works on other routers.

If you try it let me know your results. I'll pass it onto Apple.

I've been dealing with the problem of my wifi dropping for several months now on my iMac and MacBook Air. Like a charm, every 5 minutes it would drop like a charm - iPhone, iPad and PCs connected without a problem. I've been following this thread for months now. I eventually reinstalled Snow Leopard on my iMac which took care of the problem on that machine. However, because my MacBook Air came with Lion and could not be downgraded to Snow Leopard it has been a door stop till this weekend. I used Boot Camp Assistant to install Windows 7 Pro and have been succesfully connected to my network without drop for several days now.

This tells us what we pretty much already know - not a hardward issue....has to be something in Lion. I haven't installed Mountain Lion yet but probably will soon. Just wanted to chime in that the MacBook Air has no connection issues when running Windows 7 in Bootcamp.

jrpeterson5 wrote:

This tells us what we pretty much already know - not a hardware issue....has to be something in Lion.

Shhh!! .... You'll wake Mr Wi-Fi interference.

Troubleshooting Wi-Fi issues in OS X Lion

Do you like giving links to useless things?

Well it makes 3 days now and no dropping wifi.

Mac 101

I did nothing to my ML's setting.

I went into my DIR-615 router. Changed the security mode to "Enable WPA2 only" instead of "Enable WPA2/WPA".

ML still disconnects when sleep, but will connect quickly after waking.