Q: Wifi Constantly Dropping in Lion

@secpro

In my case, the issue was resolved with a new Apple router, although this wasn't the primary reason I bought it. I wanted to replace my Time Capsule becuase I ran out of backup space and if I was going to resort to external add-on storage I figured there was little point in a router with a built-in hard drive. More importantly I wanted a new Airport with the simultaneous dual band capability so I could provide full speed wifi for supported devices while still supporting those that don't support 5GHz likemy iPhone and PS3.

In any case, for some reason this also resolved my iMac's wifi issue. The issue never affected my MacBook Pro or other devices in the sam apartment. None of the other mentioned solutions worked for more than a day or so before the problem returned. My next steo would have been to take the iMac and router to an Apple store and let them figure it out, but the new router fixed everything.

Sorry, I know this isn't particularly helpful, but just wanted to sahre what worked and didn't work for me.

Well isn't that great. Any other device, even other Apple devices, connect to any router without a problem except Mac computers until you buy a Apple router.

Thank you for your response. It is disappointing though since if I were to implement that solution, it would only be a home solution. I would still have the same problems elsewhere.

People are experiencing this with Mac routers. It's not router specific although in some cases a replaced router fixes the issue. Not sure anyone here fully understands the root cause...

Unfortunately in my case it was an Apple router that fixed the problem as well.  Though in my case I had an older Aiport Extreme in storage that I wasn't using that I hooked back up.  So at least I didn't have to resort to buying a new router.

Whoah whoah whoah there. How is replacing the router a reasonable solution? Is a person supposed to replace every router at every place they visit? At the airport? At a coffe house in Amsterdam? In a hotel in the Philippines? Please. Just stop with the nonsense. Let's find a real solution to this.

And yes, it is a real downer to have to deal with stupid wifi problems when wandering about the planet. Utterly negative.

secpro wrote:

 

Whoah whoah whoah there. How is replacing the router a reasonable solution? Is a person supposed to replace every router at every place they visit? At the airport? At a coffe house in Amsterdam? In a hotel in the Philippines? Please. Just stop with the nonsense. Let's find a real solution to this.

 

And yes, it is a real downer to have to deal with stupid wifi problems when wandering about the planet. Utterly negative.

I don't know if you remember or not, but prior to there being a "WiFi" organization, there were countless wireless implementations that were sold as a router, and a USB radio that would only talk to that brand of router.  The standards are an important part of interworking.  802.11n has specific requirements as does 802.11b/802.11g interworking.  A lot of the router companies have chose to use something well known, like the WRT, open source projects implementation for their products.  Others, have rolled their own.  Software can and will have bugs.

Apple's software has bugs.  In this particular case, the bug is most likely in the WiFi driver handling and reacting to interfering signals from either bad WiFi implementations, or strong RF signals that swamp the receiver on your WiFi radio and cause it to "drop" the connection since it can't decode anything from the AP.  But, that's just my guess.

Buying a new router, as I've stated elsewhere, could only solve the problem, if it was the original AP that had a problem, or if you changed to 802.11N on 2.4ghz or 5ghz, and that removed or camoflaged the interferring signal/pattern.

Radio is not simple.  Software for 802.11 is not simple.  I think Apple will most likely drop a .5 update to Lion soon, but may just delay, and include any proposed fix into Mountain Lion.  But, we'll just all get to wait and see, either way.

I have tried everything in this and other forums on the Internet the last two weeks since I upgraded it lion. To day I just turned of the sleeping mode on my old MacBook, and the Internet is working perfectly. I use my computer on my desk with the power connected anyway, so I dont don't need to save power. However, the screen is still going into sleeping mode as it used to.

The only reason there are "signal" problems is because Apple is not managing the power-management in the wifi chipset. The broadcom chips universally have the same power management issues and it is up to the OS to work around it. Apple is refusing to do so (rightly so actually) and here we are with Apple denying there is a problem and apparently nobody posting an actual solution. I do have to wonder if there have been posts that actually solved it but were removed for PR reasons.

Tell me what it is like in 3 days from now. Are the problems back? I bet they are. I get a few days of connectivity sometimes when I find something new to change in power management. Wish I could find the button to turn the power management off on the wifi chipset. It would solve all of these stupid problems. You can not even BUY a program that does it. ***?

Tokva, after reading your post yesterday, I changed my sleep mode in my Imac, so far I have not had any problem!

I hope this continues!

I have tried this with my MBP, it looks like a fix for me.  Not one that I like as I would like power managment, and I don't see why Apple would be refusing to make a fix as it's their OS to the end user and I personally couldn't care less about Broadcom's issues, I just want working OSX.

secpro; it's still working for me.

Also, still working for me.

It is very nice not to have the connecting problem.

This is even worce than Lion was.  What the He!! do they bata test these things on.