Q: Wifi Constantly Dropping in Lion

I had all of the reported issues with my WiFi after upgrading to Lion, and I tried every suggestion on the first few pages of this thread.  I found the fix in another thread, and thought it could help some of you out. 
I logged in to my wireless router, and went to the wireless settings.  The default channel it was using was "1".  Many people found success by changing theirs to either channel 6 or 11.   Mine didn't give me an option for 11, so I selected 6, and this fixed it!!!!   Apparently there are 12 channels to choose from in most routers, and Apple supports about 4 of those channels.  Channels 6 and 11 are supported (not sure what the other 2 channels are), but try changing the channel to 6 or 11.  It fixed my problem.

Hi guys.

I was having problems with constant disconnections. It would appear as if I was connected but internet pages and pings would time out.

I tried lots of the solutions on this thread and nothing worked.  Upgraded to ML and the problem persisted.

Today I solved the problem.  I have 2 Apple Laptops and 1 Windows desktop on the same network.  for some reason the windows machine was causing all the devices to lose their connection periodically.  Once I turned the PC's wireless off everything started working flawlessly again.  Not sure if this is just an isolated case or if this will work for anyone else.

I suspect I need to reinstall the drivers for the Windows machine but I will look in to that another time.

Good luck!

misskels wrote:

 

Today I solved the problem.  I have 2 Apple Laptops and 1 Windows desktop on the same network.  for some reason the windows machine was causing all the devices to lose their connection periodically.  Once I turned the PC's wireless off everything started working flawlessly again.  Not sure if this is just an isolated case or if this will work for anyone else.

 

I suspect I need to reinstall the drivers for the Windows machine but I will look in to that another time.

This is a very interesting report.  It would be great if you could post any additional information that you find back here to update us on what you find was the root cause of the windows machine seeming to disable the network.  Did you connect the problem PC with a wire and everything still work okay?

Hello, Ive been having drop outs sinces last year with my macbook air, ever since I bought it. Nothing ever worked for me, constantly turn off and then on airport for the macbook to connect correctly. Anyway... Saturday, I installed Mountain Lion, to give it a go. Believe it or not, now my macbook air wakes up and connects straight to the network and all works perfectly fine now! So must have been something with Lion, as I have had the same problem with any router I connect to, but only problems with macbook air, my macbook pro works fine anywas on Lion. I thought Id mention this to everyone. Try out Mountain Lion as its sorted my problems out

So far my wifi dropping problem seems to be gone after a week of Mountain Lion, fingers crossed.

The Wi-Fi would just drop out randomly when my iPhone would be working, my iPad would be working, it was the Wi-Fi on the iMac dropping out, the operating system then was lion.

My WIFI dropping problem is gone after a week of Mountain Lion too.

After having the WIFI issue (tested repeatedly on all releases of Lion & never happening on Snow Leopard)  I have not once had a WIFI subsystem dropout/crash - and that's with long, continued use over the course of about  1 week.

This would never happen with (plain) Lion and so I'm prepared to declare this problem fixed, for me.

It was fixed on my fresh Lion installed partition which I upgraded to Mountain Lion.

And it's also fixed on my Snow Leopard installation which I upgraded to Mountain Lion.

I had no problems upgrading to Mountain Lion whatsoever.

It might be worth mentioning, that part of the installation was to upgrade the firmware for the sake of the "internet-recovery feature". I let that install too.

So, it took 1 year... I feel like throwing a "bug-fix" party.

Glad to hear Mountain Lion has fixed it for some folks. I was only able to fix the problem by downgrading back to Snow Leopard, and I am very nervous to upgrade to Mountain Lion. But maybe after a few more updates I will give it a try.

@eROCK1

Changing the channel from 1 to 11 seemed to fix my today's wifi-troubles. I am using a time capsule in bridge mode to extend my network and it worked well. Having updated from Lion to Mountain Lion I changed the channel to 1. I never thought that channel 1 might cause a problem - blaming it on Mountain Lion.

The signal of channel 11 is quite weak. My iPhone is constantly losing connection. Maybe I should try channel 6?

Does anyone have an explanation for the channel 6 / 11 thing with Apple routers?

gatorpilot wrote:

 

@eROCK1

 

Changing the channel from 1 to 11 seemed to fix my today's wifi-troubles. I am using a time capsule in bridge mode to extend my network and it worked well. Having updated from Lion to Mountain Lion I changed the channel to 1. I never thought that channel 1 might cause a problem - blaming it on Mountain Lion.

 

The signal of channel 11 is quite weak. My iPhone is constantly losing connection. Maybe I should try channel 6?

 

Does anyone have an explanation for the channel 6 / 11 thing with Apple routers?

Most routers in the US, used to come shipped with the default channel of 6 set.  So, everyone was on Channel 6, and the usability of WiFi was impacted when there were more than a handful of users close to each other.  802.11n and MIMO increases bandwidth by using multiple channels.  So, channels 1, 6 and 11 are what you should use to keep from overlapping channels and having your signal interfere with two channels, or you having to deal with more users packets interfering with your WiFi.  If you have poorer performance on one of those channels, than on another, then you'll probably find more people around you using that channel, creating interference.  It may be something besides WiFi too.  2.4ghz allocations in the U.S., for FCC Part 15, are used by wireless phones, baby monitors, TV signal extenders and lots of other things.  Some of the devices are quite nasty in the types of signals they generate.

Power output is the primary issue.  The FCC says 1watt out of the antenna (with antenna gain/amplification) is max power allowed.  Most WiFi is 200-300 milliwatts, or 0.2 to 0.3 watts because people are generally near the equipment, and safety is a consideration.

Some of the junk on the market can be putting out a full watt which will dwarf your WiFi signal, and thus make it harder for it to work reliably/effectively.

Antennas design also is important.  A poor antenna system might make one end of the spectrum, or the other not work so well, because it is not wide enough bandwidth to do equally well on all frequencies.  This is also one of the reasons why the manufacturers put Channel 6 in as the default.  That puts it in the middle where the antenna sweet spot is.

Hi @gatorpilot

We're not referring to generic WIFI connection problems in this thread - at least I'm not - and most others aren't.

If you read back, you'll find reference to a persistent "WIFI dropout" problem, meaning the entire WIFI subsystem on Lion basically crashes and needs to be restarted. AppleTV can't connect, all WIFI is completely down.

In my case "Snow Leopard" never (not once) suffered this issue but as soon as I booted into Lion the WIFI subsystem would go down and nothing WIFI could be used until I restarted (off/on).

My discovery that Mountain Lion finally fixes the problem is a revelation to what is obviously a software bug that was never on Snow Leopard was persistent in all releases of Lion and is now finally "fixed" on Mountain Lion.

@delventhalz you probably shouldn't necessarily trust me. But just to be clear, I was in the same position as you.

I went back to Snow Leopard. I then "upgraded" Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion.

No problems with the upgrade - well, except 2 of my 8 email accounts that I had setup in Mail didn't appear, so I'll have to readd them.

     I thought I should pass this on.  Apple called me yesterday and they are following these threads.   They told me that right now they are gathering data and they weren't calling me with a fix yet.  They had me try different things others have recommended and then they would have me run some test and email it to them.    Luckally my Mac kept dropping wifi while I was talking to them and using my Macbook without it going into sleep mode. .  

     Again they are taking it seriously, they are reading the threads.   They are looking into what has worked for some people and not for others.

     Now this is My advise,  Post what you are trying, BUT Don't post that it's working for you until you test it for a day.  Some are trying everything in every post and then they are disappointed that it didn't work  and forget to change things back and that could lead to other issues down the road.

Again don't post it worked for you because it didn't drop wifi for a few hours give it a day.

@furrytoes

It is good to know that some people are having their problem fixed by Mountain Lion. I will probably buy it for my laptop when it hits 10.8.1. Before I upgrade my iMac I will use my external HDD to create a bootable copy of the drive with Snow Leopard installed. If Mountain Lion causes issues I'm resetting that ************ to Snow Leopard that day.

Over a week now without a drop in wifi after installing Mountain Lion. I know it wasnt my airport express as it worked fine with my laptop on Snow Leopard and my iPad3 and iPhone 4s.

Fingers and toes still crossed.

all I did was enable debugging and reboot (as requested by Apple Engineering)

I hadn't changed any settings on my access point or anything else on my network and it's been working fine 3 nearly 3 weeks.

Since then I've disabled debugging and installed Mountain Lion on top of my existing install to fix other issues and it's still fine.

This makes no sense to me, but that's what happened *shrug*.