Wifi Constantly Dropping in Lion

OK, lets get a few things straight..

If everything worked perfect before upgrading, this issue should not be your router period. If everything else wireless on your network is working fine.

Also If it was a DNS issue with in the mac, you should still be connected to your wifi access point or wireless router. If you look at the top of the mac with the wifi bars are showing a good connection to your router and you cant see the internet , then that could be a DNS problem.

If you have , Like I do , a random loss of the wifi for a bit, by looking at the top wifi and seeing an ! or showing that its not connected. That means its not connected to your wifi- and has nothing to do with DNS.

Also not allowing the mac to sleep does not help, nor does setting the IP to maual with dhcp or static. This is a mac OS LION problem and should be addressed by apple with a fix or patch ASAP.

Slyclops

Totally agree. I have to admit that I do not understand half the things people are talking about here despite having used Macs since 1986 - PCs, DOS, Edlin, et al, for longer. I do think these occasional "blips" seem to generate an extraordinary amount solutions that generally never work or even make things worse - especially if people like me start trying to follow the "experts".

In my case, the MBP works fine, the iMac has the odd blip when woken from sleep. Apart from the machines everything else is common. I do get the feeling that, with a few exceptions, this seems to be an iMac problem more than anything else - or maybe it's just because more people have an iMac.

I'll wait for the update.

Cheers

TY

Sorry for the "me too," but exactly the same as Slyclops: Zero connecctivity issues in SL, upgraded to Lion on day 1, within half an hour (maybe sooner) after the install was completed I began getting random loss of wi-fi (bars grayed out), no pattern or predictability, problem persists through just a few minutes ago. The only difference I notice is that the connection seems to remain active so long as I am actively typing or surfing (during my composition of this reply, for example, there has been no disconnect) but once I stop, the random disconnects begin again whether or not the screen has dimmed or the mac has gone the sleep. The problem seems also to persist in both Safari and Chrome.

Slyclops wrote:

If everything worked perfect before upgrading, this issue should not be your router period. If everything else wireless on your network is working fine.

Unfortunately, that would not a valid statement unless the AirPort drivers in Lion used the exact same code with the exact same timing as Snow Leopard, which is not the case.

As soon as the Lion drivers start issuing different requests in perhaps a different order with different timing, the firmware on the router plays as big a role as the driver as to whether operation continues without issue.

WK,

If, indeed, Lion is "issuing different requests in perhaps a different order with different timing", and yet, ALL your Windows PC's, your iPhone, iPad, and Android devices, your wireless printers and hundreds of different wireless streaming media products WORK PERFECTLY, and SL worked perfectly previous to the upgrade to Lion, then how in the world can you justify Lion's behavior as OK and/or NORMAL??

Face it...the billions of wifi routers in the world (both private and free/public) shouldn't need reconfiguration to work with Lion. That's just plain ridiculous.

Apple needs to change their timing or order of requests so Lion works with everything else, not the other way around.

WK, What you said just said is also admitting the fact that Lion uses somthing different than SL, at that point all bets are off, and its not the same. Why would we blame the router, airport? Its(router) been sitting over by the dsl or cable modem, giving all 15 of our ios devices a wonderful route to the internet for the past few years with no issues.

..sorry to be strong willed about this, but I am also a Network certified tech for a living.

If the Lion is making different requests , fix it(Apple) or just tell us how to get by, its that simple.

I have last years imac, btw.

Ditto that... djiti's solution has worked for me now for the last couple days, not a single dropout (after a dozen in the first half hour of use). I've come to like Lion so much, I look forward to getting on the computer.

To save people from scrolling back to djiti's post (unless they want to "Like" or mark it "Correct Answer" which they should), here's the tip from djiti...

Once you've got a working connection (unplug-replug router), open Terminal and paste in the following 'ping' code:

ping `route get default | awk '(/gateway/){print $2}'`

Don't close Terminal... just "Hide" with command-H.

Bonus suggestion: For a faster more reliable connection, also open your System Preferences/Network and using the Advanced tab, enter this under DNS servers:

8.8.8.8

Sorry for posting that in other spots, but one wants to make sure that -- if it's working as it seems to be for so many -- everybody has an easy time finding it. Surely this is an easy fix for Apple and will be out soon.

same problem here. Last years 27" i5 iMac, everything was fine with my Wi-Fi connection....I upgraded to Lion and it is not working well. Downloads cance, and are slow and after a few seconds I can't open a webside with Safari. When I turn Wi-Fi Off/On it works for 10 seconds and is down again.

My iPhone 4, iPad 2 and Windows Netbook are all working fine. It has nothing to do with the router..it is plain simple Lion.

The trick with the Terminal is not working for me though......I still get timeouts all the time.

I totally agree with you, Darryl. I don't have the time or inclination to screw around with workarounds for an OS I purchased with the rightful expectation that it could do something as basic as staying connected to WiFi. Apple needs to get this fixed; it is obviously a major problem experienced by many.

Flakster, I've read all your posts & I think a lot of us here have exactly the same "specific" problem as you mate.
Can you do us all a favour & post the solution when(if) you or the engeneers find one pal?
I've been searching & waiting for a week to find the solution!

🙂 Cheers dude.

For my MBP, this appears to be an issue with Beacon and DTIM intervals of my access points (SonicWALL). I've had success with the following settings:

802.11a:

Beacon Interval: 100 ms

DTIM Interval: 1

I have not tried any other settings with this network type.

802.11g:

Beacon Interval: 200 ms

DTIM Interval 1

A beacon interval of 300 ms with same DTIM results in recurrent drops.

Count me in, too. Installed Lion on a 2008 MBP and a 2010 iMac - both are now dropping wifi frequently. Very annoying.

Hey everyone,
I had been having a problem with the Wifi on my MBP dropping ever since I downloaded Lion last week. I tried several different suggestions and nothing worked. It just so happened that I had a satellite dish installed the other day and had to disconnect my cable from the wall, which in turn messed up my cable modem. Afterwards, I couldn’t get my wifi to work on any of my devices (HP laptop, iPhone, Kindle, or MBP) for hours and I ended up having to reset my router and reinstall it completely. I have not had my wifi on my MBP drop since completely resetting my router and starting from scratch. So if someone hasn’t already suggested this, try resetting and reinstalling your router.

Slyclops wrote:

WK, What you said just said is also admitting the fact that Lion uses somthing different than SL, at that point all bets are off, and its not the same. Why would we blame the router, airport? Its(router) been sitting over by the dsl or cable modem, giving all 15 of our ios devices a wonderful route to the internet for the past few years with no issues.

Different does not mean wrong.

For the 10,000th time:

Say there is a firmware bug where a device, when asked to add "2 + 3" calculates it as "5" but when asked to add "3 + 2" calculates it as 6.

It is not Apple's responsibility to change their code to work around the device's bug, nor should they.

If what Apple's doing conforms to applicable standards, they can issue whatever commands they want in whatever order they want with whatever timing they want; that's the point of a device standard.

Once again, I'm not saying that there isn't a bug here, but rather that there's no proof at this point that there is; simply saying "it worked before, it doesn't now" is not sufficient for the reason cited above.

Another quick example - there was a certain drive made by a very large manufacturer that would actually hang if it received a certain sequence of commands in a certain order within a certain time frame, requiring a power cycle of the drive to recover (difficult at best as it was designed as an internal drive that one would find built into a PC, notebook, etc. and required an actual physical power off/power on to become unstuck.)

Despite the fact that tens of thousands of these drives had been sold and were in use the world over on multiple different hardware platforms running multiple different operating systems, the fact remained that the code - operating completely within the applicable spec - caused the drive to hang.

Was it the developer's responsibility to change their code so the drive didn't hang? Since it was shown the code was completely within spec, no, it was the manufacturer's responsibility to fix their firmware - which they did, by the way.

"It works everywhere else" and/or "it worked before" is, sadly, not a valid method of root causing an issue.

Your theory would work if the problem did not happen to users with Apple's routers. When the connections are not stable with Apple's own routers with current firmware and a computer with current software something is wrong with the most recent thing to change. That would be the software on the computer.