Wifi Constantly Dropping in Lion

Well I've been following this thread (and a few others) over the past many months, and finally decided to join in the discussion - I need to vent!! Bought my Mac in August 2011, and always had wifi dropping issues. Husband bought new router sometime this past spring, but I continue to drop.

Nothing else in the house drops!! 3 iPods, 1 iPhone, 1 other smartphone, 1 iPad, 3 Windows laptops, Apple TV, etc etc..... ONLY my Mac, drops. Over and over and over and over! Wifi symbol is black, so apparently it's "on", but pages won't load, videos freeze in youtube, etc. Then I do get the "you are not connected to the internet" message. The only solution is to manually click to turn wifi off, then turn wifi on.... wait..... then select our network from the list. Sometimes this doesn't even work, and I have to do a restart. This is ridiculous!!

I have no computer technical smarts what-so-ever, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out it is a Lion issue! My old dinosaur PC worked on our old router without dropping, and all our other devices never, ever, ever drop. Only the Mac. Hmmmm.....

My Apple support has expired, and when I did bring it into Apple store earlier this summer, they did a ping test and said "your wifi is fine....". Oh, ok, thanks for the help. Brought it home, still dropped! I'm ready to toss this thing out the freakin' window and go get a cheap PC - configuration of our house won't allow me to run a cable, and I shouldn't have to! Husband made sure router firmware is updated, so that's not the issue.

139 pages of complaints on this..... and folks at Apple store look at you like you're crazy when you tell them about the problem. I said "go to the support community and search wifi dropping......you'll see what I'm talking about!"

APPLE - PLEASE FIX THIS!

If all else fails then just buy a cheap Lion compatible USB wi-fi dongle.

To all and sundry,

The latest update to the OS seems to have fixed the irritating wifi dropout, and it's plagued me for months largely by being totally unpredictable. How Apple got away without saying anything publicly about it (compare this to the fuss over it's iphone map fiasco) is simply amazing. Now there's corporate perseverance for you. Sooner or later there'll be a 'fix' and in any case, we're just to big to f**k with. Apple's beginning to look and feel, if you'll excuse the pun, more and more like Microsoft.

Millions of us have to fork out £20 for an operating system instead of getting the works on some disks as part of the pc. And from now on, whenever Apple 'improves' the software, we'll have to fork out another £20! It's outrageous!

Indeed,

Mountain Lion fixed the WIFI-issue over here.

What does the wi-fi dongle do?

momof3bnd wrote:

What does the wi-fi dongle do?

http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,1237,t=USB+wireless+dongle&i=60265,00.a sp

The wi-fi issue isn't the same for everyone, so one fix for someone may not be the same fix for everyone else. The wi-fi dongle is like an external wireless card that plugs into your USB drive. Just like an external hard drive that plugs in to your USB. I recently spent $50 on one of these USB wi-fi dongles, and I still have the same network drops as before.

But I've heard stories about a dongle resolving other people's issues. Trial and error I guess. It didn't work for me, so I'm going to return it and keep investigating.

eROCK1 wrote:

The wi-fi issue isn't the same for everyone, so one fix for someone may not be the same fix for everyone else. The wi-fi dongle is like an external wireless card that plugs into your USB drive. Just like an external hard drive that plugs in to your USB. I recently spent $50 on one of these USB wi-fi dongles, and I still have the same network drops as before.

But I've heard stories about a dongle resolving other people's issues. Trial and error I guess. It didn't work for me, so I'm going to return it and keep investigating.

This is the key point in this list. Some people seem to have "The Apple WiFi problem". But, so many others do not. They have some other problem with their network, but, because it involves WiFi, and they've found these threads, they just believe that there is only one problem.

What is important to understand, is that Apple's WiFi appears to be counting on utilizing every bit of the features of 802.11g/n as best they can. There are apparently some routers which are incompatible with this expectation, or Apple deals with their 'non-support' in unexpected failure. But at any rate, everyone needs to make sure that their routers have the latest firmware from the manufacturers' website. These devices are almost always shipped months and months before they appear on the store shelves, and then months can elapse before you buy them, and all that time, new devices are getting software fixes which you need to download and apply.

Without doing that, your expectations may not be met. If you don't have the technical skills to check the firmware on your router, then hire someone to do it, or buy/rent a router from your ISP and get them to manage it for you.

momof3bnd wrote:

Wifi symbol is black, so apparently it's "on", but pages won't load, videos freeze in youtube, etc. Then I do get the "you are not connected to the internet" message. The only solution is to manually click to turn wifi off, then turn wifi on.... wait..... then select our network from the list. Sometimes this doesn't even work, and I have to do a restart. This is ridiculous!!

I have no computer technical smarts what-so-ever, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out it is a Lion issue! My old dinosaur PC worked on our old router without dropping, and all our other devices never, ever, ever drop. Only the Mac. Hmmmm.....

If the bars are black, than your WiFi is working fine. What is not working, is something between your computer and your ISP. If you have someone with technical skills around you, who can help trouble shoot this, at your house, that would be the best bet. Look on the comments here about "ping" and using that with the IP address 8.8.8.8 (the public google DNS server). If you can get "ping -n 8.8.8.8" to work when your "WiFi is not working", then you have a DNS problem. You need to check with your ISP about that, and also look in the networking system preferences. Select WiFi Adapater, then click the Advanced button. On the DNS tab, there should be NOTHING there when your WiFi is disconnected. When it is connected, your ISP should provide working DNS servers whose IP addresses will appear in that list. You can try adding 8.8.8.8 to that list, and move it to the "top" of the list to see if that changes your situation for the better. If it doesn't help, then delete it from that list.

There are lots of people who have had this kind of behavior, and many of them fixed it by doing something with their equipment or ISP, because that path to the internet had a problem.

I have a new mac mini with mountain lion and because I have several Macs, did not really pay attention to the wifi issue until I was spending more time using the mini. The wifi connection was constantly dropping. I have a cable modem router as well as a Cisco aironet access point. All of my Macs are connected to the Cisco access point but only the mini has mountain lion. After switching the mini to the ssid on the cable modem router, I have not experience the disconnection issues. I have not had time to look at the aironet access point settings but one size does not fit all in this case.

Yep, I wish the original issue was clearly defined as "WIFI system crashing" not "WIFI dropout".

The original problem is a genuine bug, starting with Lion that wasn't fixed, in my incarnation of it, until Mountain Lion.

Where the WIFI system crashes entirely - everything to do with WIFI dies. No network, no AppleTV, no internet... nothing.

Anyone with "connection dropout" issues where a connection is "constantly dropping" have some other trifling issue.

Hi momof3bnd I had the problem for a year, but as far as I'm concerned, it was fixed in Mountain Lion. Have you tried it yet?

furrytoes wrote:

Hi momof3bnd I had the problem for a year, but as far as I'm concerned, it was fixed in Mountain Lion. Have you tried it yet?

Hi furrytoes - Nope, haven't tried Mountain Lion yet.

Gonna try the various suggestions above, like what gphonei wrote above, and see if my husband can help me figure this out. Might take a few days - will let you all know what happens. Fingers crossed! Thanks to all!

Mountain Lion is cool and all...but don't spend the money just because you think it will fix your WiFi issue. I upgraded to Mountain Lion, and STILL have the same WiFi issues as before. It's not a hardware issue because I bypassed my internal wireless card by installing a USB dongle, and still had the issue with the dongle. I spoke with the dongle manufacturer about it since all they deal with is WiFi, and they suggested that it could be a router issue or ISP related. Funny thing is, right next to my iMac is an HP laptop connected to the same wifi connection, and it doesn't have the drop outs. So it has something to do with OS X....just not sure WHAT part of OS X yet.

Troubleshooting Wi-Fi issues in OS X Lion