Q: Wifi Constantly Dropping in Lion

Try the Lion supplied app in this link http://www.macworld.com/article/162117/2011/09/monitor_wi_fi_with_lions_hidden_t ool.html#lsrc.rss_main

Maybe you get some data that helps solve the problem.

i experienced first time the wifi connection issue yesterday. i was using a wpa personal protected network, when suddenly the connection dropped. airport still showed that i'm connected to the network, but no webpage loaded, ping wasn't working. i restarted my mbp 13, middle 2009, clean lion install, shutdown/restart, nothing helped. then suddenly the network reappeared and the pages were loading.

after my mbp has awaken from sleep, once again, connected, but no traffic. i tried everything, restart, shutdown/restart, wifi on/off, restarting router, hardwired net... nothing. as i noticed the problem was, that i didn't received a correct ip, gateway adress from router. renewing the dhcp lease didn't help, i still got the wrong settings from router with wifi, and hardwired too. i tried to set the ip, gateway, subnet mask manually, but it didn't help.

i was getting quite nervous so i tried the one thing that broke the network, sleep/wake, and behold the net was ok on wifi.

today i could connect to my work network (wep) without any problem.

i coludn't think of any reasonable answer for the problem... it wasn't only a wifi issue, cause i had the same problem with a wired network (same router as wifi). airport was seeing other wifi hotspot so airport was working, i could connect to my home network, but there was no data traffic (web pages not loading, update not working).

i hope this isn't going to happen again, i'm waiting for the software update.

Perhaps not suprisingly, the diagnostic utility seems to misbehave also. I turned on debug logging, and after a couple of minutes it started pegging one of the cores, displayed the pizza wheel and would not respond to mouse input. Had to force quit.

Hi Gregory,

thanks for bringing this up.

I thought I was too stupid to use it... the wifi diagnostics I mean.

The bad thing is, if you watch this in console.app, the scan is still running, just the frontend - wifi diagnostics - is stalling. I got several spin reports (beachball of death).

To stop the running scan, I rebooted the computer.

I still think that Lion has a serious Wifi problem.

So far I did everything that Apple care told me (even reinstall from recovery partition), but so far nothing helped.

Even after booting from recovery partition, I could not get constant wifi connection.

That is why I had to use ethernet to reinstall Lion as it needs to download files from the net.

Martin

I just read this from another thread on the wi-fi issue. At least this gives us hope. It was posted by Radiation Mac on Sept. 4th:

"ATTENTION Fellow Frustrated Lion Users:  I got off the phone with U.S. Apple Support a few days ago . The Rep said that indeed Apple is aware of the loss of Internet connection and the loss of Wi-Fi connection after awaking from sleep, and the automatic immediate wake from sleep.  He said the problem as the Apple Engineers see it is that instead of Lion putting JUST the monitor and harddrive to sleep as it should, Lion is instead put almost all Sytem Functions to sleep as if you had temporarily turned off the computer.

A fix is almost finished and will soon be available as a "Software Update."

Hang in there guys ;-)"

Message was edited by: craigfromgoshen

Just adding my voice to this. Mid-2009 MacBook Pro will randomly drop the connection. Mid-2011 Mac Mini is fine on WiFi. Router is D-Link DIR-625.

unfortunately the problem i'm seeing has nothing to do with SLEEP.  the wifi connection (despite full bars) just comes and goes.  it makes downloading from local machines, the internet, itunes, et cetera, IMPOSSIBLE. i have this problem across four different machines, all running LION.  one of the machines, a laptop, is rendered almost completely useless.  it drops outside my house as well.  feeling VERY FRUSTRATED by all this.  if there was an easy way to switch back to snow leopard i would.  this morning, two weeks after installing lion and giving wireless a chance, i have re-wired all my machines.  apple used to have the most reliable wifi machines. THIS *****.

Same here - while wifi almost always fails when waking form sleep, it's not the only time. Wifi will frequently drop out during periods of activity. My problems are almost exclusively at work, where there are hundreds of Cisco access points each with two SSIDs - one secured (WPA2) and one open. My home wifi works fine.

I am so glad I found this thread. I was starting to think that my January 2011 MBP had been dropped or something. Can someone tell me how they got on with Apple Technical support? Is it worth booking my first ever trip to a Genius bar for this?

You could certainly try, but I don't think much would come of it when it's a known widespread problem.

Hi there,

I have a new macmini i7 and I have the same behaviuor.

I have a wifi router connected to and ADSL modem.

I have dome some testing with the ping command.

I ping from the macmini the router, the modem and a host on internet.

I find some "timeout" that should not be there, but not in correspondence of the app connection drop (msn for example).

I think is something related to a maximum simultaneous connections.

The timeouts are more frequent when i open connections (10 web pages for examples).

Obviously no ping timeout should be present in my network (only on internet whold be acceptable). A missed ping means some kind of failure.

No solution of this thread worked for me.

Hi,

I was thinking of buying my first mac in october a 13inch macbook pro. But not so sure now with all the heat problems and espesially the wifi problems. I thought Macs were surposed to be good and reliable they don,t seem to be with the 2011 macbooks. I have a $300 acer aspire one used it for 2 years excelant little netbook wifi has never had a prob conects to any wifi signal even from hotels 30 yards away. I expected an apple to peform perfectly staight out of the box maybe have to stick with a p,c!

  Steve

I upgraded my MBP i7 15inch mid-2010 Snow Leopard about a month back, I did not encounter any issues with WiFi dropping on mine though but I did encounter slow Lion start up. O.K that is not what I want to write about but lets get to this WiFi dropping issue discussed in these threads.

A friend of mine bought a brand new MacBook Air 13inch with OS X Lion a week ago and he was sorely dissapointed, he encountered frequent WiFi dropping off or lost connection issues at his home WiFi network. It would not accept WiFi password eventhough it was the correct one that worked a few minutes earlier. It would not rejoin WiFi coming out of Sleep mode. Only a reboot would sometimes solve the issue temporarily and after 10 or 15 minutes perhaps an hour the same issue happens all over again. His old Sony Vaio on Windows XP was chugging along just fine on this very same Home WiFi network of his..hmm??

So he brought the laptop into the office for some help from me, I was equally puzzled as to why he had such an issue. Anyway I set up the MB Air to join the office WiFi Access Point, it's a Cisco AP 1300series running WPA/WPA2 Personal, TKIP-PSK with password 13 characters or longer, invisible SSID. Office environment had multiple Access Points with same SSID and also other WiFi network from nearby offices with different SSIDs. Pretty standard fair as today goes when WiFi networking is concerned.

Loh and behold..The MB Air worked fine the whole day on WiFi at the office without loosing or dropping a single time at all even when roaming between Access Points, hmm, so why was it losing connection at his home WiFi network then??

Next I had a look at my friend's home WiFi Router, it's a D-Link model DIR-615 WiFi Access Point & Router.

The settings in it were mostly manufacturer's default..

Auto 802.11b/g/n, Auto WPA/WPA2 Personal, Auto TKIP/AES encryption, the password issued was provided by the Router in the setup steps, strangely it was only a 9 character alphanumeric password. Full power 100%, Channel was set to 5 and so on..

Apparently the MacBook Air did not like the above settings issued by the router and it kept falling out of connection every few minutes as earlier described. So I proceeded to setup up the router manually as follows..

Setup WiFi to Auto 802.11b/g/n, Auto WPA/WPA2 Personal, fixed to TKIP-PSK (instead of AES) and issued a 16 character AlphaNumeric password, set Channel to Auto or in some countries Channel 1 & 5 is Auto all other settings unchanged. That solved the MB Air's WiFi dropping out issue for good.

It seems to me some makes of routers are not implementing the Auto TKIP/AES feature correctly and that kind of screws up the ecryption key rotation that happens between the MacBook's Airport interface and the Router itself. Setting them up manually to WPA/WPA2 with TKIP-PSK did help solve the problem for my friend's MacBook Air.

Sweet Jesus that MB Air starts up in like 20seconds now and gets on the Net like a bat out of ****....

Hi,

   We can,t all go into wifi spots and start changing router settings so our Macs will work. Apple should have sorted this problem out P.. poor......Think i'll stick with a p.c

  Steve

Steve,

I agree, for some like my friend who bought his very first Mac Book Air, facing this type of trouble can be extremely dissapointing.

Well like I said my own MBP 15inch i7 mid-2010 had no issues with any WiFi connectivity when it was running Snow Leopard or Lion. The same with my 2009 iMac 27inch at home, also had no issues there either running Lion.

Agreed not everyone has access into a WiFi Router/Access Point's settings..and honestly I can't tell you why some Macs seems to have issues with WiFi connectivity and some don't after upgrading to Lion that is, it could be related to a particular hardware/chipset or even set of WiFi drivers..I'm sure Apple is aware and pretty sure there is fix coming soon.