Wifi Constantly Dropping in Lion

Well, as I said in my previous post,

• iMac 27" Late 2009
• Apple Airport Extreme 802.11n (4th Generation)
• All software/drivers are up to date.

Yet I am also having the same problem - should "plug and play" not work between Apple products?

Over 18,000 views on this thread tells me other people are searching on how to solve this problem as well...

• iMac 27" Late 2009
• Apple Airport Extreme 802.11n (4th Generation)
• All software/drivers are up to date.

No, your configuration should be primed to work, the question then becomes why it doesn't given hundreds of thousands of others with the same configuration as you aren't seeing those issues.

It's not a case of your doing something wrong but rather what's different about your configuration that makes this happen to you when it's not (necessarily) happening to others.

@William Kucharski:

Did you try to change the beacon interval of your WAP, in order to reproduce the issue?

It works well with my setup: 100 ms = reliable link, 1000 ms = regular drops.

I have the late 2009 iMac model and prior to upgrading to Lion had no issues with my wi-fi being dropped, now, every single time I return the machine from sleep it needs to reconnect and my connection drops which requires me to disconnect and reconnect.

My partner has a mid 2009 Macbook Pro running SL and she has no issues with the same wifi connection, we can both be online at precisely the same time and mine drops and hers is still operating so for a fact there is nothing wrong with the router (a BT home hub for reference) or its connection.

The suggestions for possible solutions from people who havent experience this issue are of no use whatsoever, it doesnt take a genius to realise that whatever changes OS X Lion has with communicating with a wifi router compared with SL needs addressing by Apple, not the end user.

@djiti

This was the issue for me. I tested a variety of beacon time intervals, and anything 200 ms or less resolved the problem. I used a DTIM of 1 and did not test any other settings.

Same here. Prior to installing Lion my wifi would connect automatically on startup or wakeup. Post Lion installation I have to manually choose my network. No other connectivity problems.

Yeah, I'm having similar though not as severe problems with wifi since upgrading.

Sometimes, it doesn't recognise a network even though other people around me are all logged on, AND it's a network already saved and in my prefs list. Turning off airport/wifi doesn't work, nor does quitting Safari.

What does work is re-booting the computer. A pain, but at least it gets me back online.

We have this problem (wifi connection dropping, won't reconnect without power cycling the router) - only on the three macs we upgraded to Lion. No problem on my old imac (not upgraded) or any of our other wireless devices including two ipad 2's.

I hardcoded an IP address this morning and have been online ever since with no issues, but my mac hasn't gone to sleep yet. Will try that soon and see what happens.

Clearly an issue with the Lion upgrade. Hope Apple finds/fixes it

I find it incredible that Apple haven't even acknowledged that there can be a (clearly very widespread) problem brought about by downloading Lion. It's not advertised as a feature ('reverse the controls on your mouse and never be able to access the internet again') and yet they're happy to keep taking people's money without warning their customers that this is the effect it will have. Incredible.

Dear WK,

your constant denial of the problem is not of real help.

What's about giving us dummies a hint how to solve the problem and we could leave this forum and continue what we want or need to do. And this definitely not to solve OS X Lion issues.

Thankx.

yeah, I've gotten used to the mouse thing...threw me off for a little while. Not sure what the motivation for that was.

The wifi thing is driving me nuts tho!

Maybe this is just an update issue. I had massive internet problems with Wi-Fi.....had to refresh the connection every 30seconds....what a pain. And my highest Downloadrates were at 1mb/s....

So, I created a Lion USB Drive, made a new backup with timemashine, erased the whole HD, and installed Lion from scratch.

I've got the system running now for a bit and it is absolutely running perfect now. It is even faster.

Downloads steady at 1.8mb/s no dropouts

Conclusion:

SL update to Lion = massive problems

Lions install from scratch = all good by now

Not the most perfect way to make the system better, but at least it is faster than waiting for an update.....if theres one....

I didn't get Lion on DVD. I just downloaded it...not sure how I could reinstall...8^(

Is there a way to make a DVD from the downloaded software?

No one gets Lion DVDs. Even with new systems shipping with Lion. To re-install, power the Mac off and then power it on holding command + r. That will start up the recovery partition.

I too have issues only with Lion.

I have an assortment of machines here all running SL or iOS and they all function flawlessly and have no wifi connection issues. However, the two machines that I installed Lion on are both dropping connections and having difficulty seeing the rest of the network. It should be noted that of these two machines, one is 5 months old and previously ran SL without a single glitch, and the other one is brand new as of yesterday (8/2/11)

So in my case at least, resetting PRAM or SMC is pointless as this defect is seen on a new Apple Store bought unit.

There is also an issue that I alluded to with Lion having trouble sharing with AFP, but that is a discussion for another thread. In any case I sure hope Apple is listening and queuing these bugs to the top of the QA list for a patch sometime very soon!