Wifi Constantly Dropping in Lion

Well.. no doubt I'm posting this in the wrong place, but I have been suffering the problem of constant drop outs for a few days now. I just looked at my network in Airport Utility and realised that although my network storage has a fixed local IP (my doing), the Airport Extreme had accidentally assigned the same IP to the MacBook pro (NAS was switched off when the network restarted, and I hadn't reserved the IPs from the router). I've just set a manual IP for the MacBook Pro and voila, the problem is fixed. I'll go around and set static IPs for everything on the network tomorrow. No doubt this wont fix the problem for everyone, but it worked for me so I figured I would share 🙂.

To get around your problem never assisgn a Static IP in the routers DHCP range. Always in the same subnet but outside of the DHCP allocated range.

yep, I understand that now! Thanks 🙂

Finished downgrading to 10.5.8. Not all that difficult. Kept Old 802.11g airport router. Wha da ya know. No more problems dropping wifi when wake from sleep. Plus can use appleworks a sweet suite that you can no longer run on Lion. So I do believe the problem was overreach with Bonjour. Besides, the architecture wasn't designed all that well for networking. DOS based systems much better at that

My issue was an old router. I had a D-Link DR655 runnning the factory firmware version at work. We tried first updating the router, after saving the config file, however, the router had issues accepting the config file it gave us with the original settings. We then found out that there was an issue with the router in general. We got a new one and I haven't had a single connection drop yet.

Don't think that the DR655 is totally outdated though. I can't say for sure what it was. We had the Firmware version at 2.00 and there have been a few updates over the years. We just couldn't get it functioning properly with the new update. It technically was still working. My wifi would drop about 10 times in a work day. Which was annoying.

If you have the same router it could still work for you with the newer firmware update while running Lion. If it doesn't then my suggestion would be to get a new wireless router. Its been a few weeks now and I can say for sure that I am having no problems.

vallejogreg wrote:

Finished downgrading to 10.5.8. Not all that difficult. Kept Old 802.11g airport router. Wha da ya know. No more problems dropping wifi when wake from sleep. Plus can use appleworks a sweet suite that you can no longer run on Lion. So I do believe the problem was overreach with Bonjour. Besides, the architecture wasn't designed all that well for networking. DOS based systems much better at that

Most windows users have little technical skill at understanding what is actually wrong. In your case, you are still pointing the figure at "old stuff" as being "correct" and new stuff as being "wrong". What you are experiencing, is a compatibility issue. You can try all you want to not upgrade and keep steping backwards to try and maintain compatibility. In the end, your best bet, is to buy a new router.

Certainly software that you need to run, no longer working, can be a problem. But, really, PPC based software is quite aged at this point. If you have limited resources to spend on your compatibilty issue, doing less can work, but it's only going to continue to be a more moving target with more and more issues to try and "track" and "keep straight".

It really will be much better, in the long run, to replace your router. Bad firmware in old, 802.11g routers is a huge issue for so many people. Most of them have no idea how to upgrade the firmware, let along actually considering that to be necessary. The think of their router like an FM radio. It's just a "radio" they say. Well, it's 5% radio and 95% software using that hardware to provide services that are complex, full of "compatibility" and "environmental" issues, that make it very challenging to get right.

ISPs with "DHCP" and "routing" problems are not uncommon either. We've see people here switch ISPs with the same router and suddenly no more problems. Your problem is just your router. Replace it and move on so you don't have to keep worrying about all the other compatibility issues...

Thanks for the reply. I was just really curious as to whether this was a router issue and the only way I could figure was to downgrade to an OS that was compatible with the older router. It amuses me to use really old stuff.

On the other hand, there have been probably a half million posts or more on this subject!

When is Apple going to just say: "With this OS 10.6.3 onward, you will need to also purchase a new router with such and such specifications"?

Because it would turn people off from making the switch from PC to Mac. Technically its not Apples fault that some of the Routers don't work for it. Its the Companies themselves which didn't do a good job of updating their old software for their products.

two words for you amigo...

THANK YOU

This solved my problem.

This took care of my problem. Thanks!

None of the other things I said solved my problem, what ended up solving my problem was lowering the ack timing in my router. I lowered it to 20. That seems to have fixed it. Apparently it's an issue with the refreshing of the connection.

tfresca wrote:

None of the other things I said solved my problem, what ended up solving my problem was lowering the ack timing in my router. I lowered it to 20. That seems to have fixed it. Apparently it's an issue with the refreshing of the connection.

Are you talking about the DHCP lease time/timeout? What brand and model is your router?

I have a Dlink dir-632 running wwrt. It was working fine then all of a sudden it wasn't. I followed the advice in all the threads but nothing really worked. So far so good with this though.

tfresca wrote:

I have a Dlink dir-632 running wwrt. It was working fine then all of a sudden it wasn't. I followed the advice in all the threads but nothing really worked. So far so good with this though.

I see this page, which points out that others have experienced drops with the standard firmware. My experience with Netgear routers has been very good. Hopefully the DD-wrt firmware will fix the problem for you.

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/D-Link_DIR-632

For those that don't know about this, there are plenty of routers like this, which run "linux" because that is free software for the "vendors" as long as they honor the GNU licensing requirements for making source available.

Individuals have then taken the hardware and various pieces of software from the vendors posts, and created the DD-WRT software package to replace the manufactures firmware.

It can solve problems to be able to make this change in software, as shown in the above link. But, you have to know what you're doing. If you haven't figure out how to replace your router's firmware with the latest from the manufacturer, that would be the first place to start. If you then find that things are still broken, you might be able to use DD-WRT firmware, if your router is one of the few that can run that software.

Overall, it might be best to just make sure that you get a router without problems to begin with. From my personal experience, I am still suggesting Netgear as one of the most stable and dependable router brands based on my experience with Linksys/CISCO, as well as these kinds of documented problems with D-Link and some of the other odd ball routers. I also have a Time Capsule that also works just find for me, so that I can do Time Machine backups on my network. It is currently my main WiFi router because I have my Netgear out of service to be used in a couple of events outside of my house.