Lion WiFi Connection Problem

I'm only getting about 10% of my capable bandwidth while using WiFi. Bought a brand new Macbook Pro laptop, ported everything over with Snowleopard and noticed the problem. I only upgraded to Lion to try and solve the issue.

Ethernet and other devices on the same wifi network work perfectly fine.

Went to Apple store, where they booted the machine with their OSX Lion hard drive and tested again. Everything worked fine. (Not apparent hardware issue)

They recommended I reinstall OS X Lion. Did that, no luck. Backed everything up, wiped machine, reinstalled Snow Leopard from scratch.

WiFi seemed to be working fine now (12-15mbps), so I proceeded to upgrade to Lion.

WiFi throughput is suffering again. 2mbps vs. 12-25mbps. I'm convinced there's a bug with the WiFi service in Lion..

Need to wipe the machine and go back to Snow Leopard I guess.

I've got a pretty new Orange Livebox router made by SAGEM and have the same problems, currently connected by Ethernet cable, thank god I did not upgrade other machines in the building to Lion, I at least am close to the router. Of course, all was perfect with the Wifi on SL!

I think the mundane fact is that of course Apple techs are keeping an eye on this and other forums and that they expect a range of issues whenever they have a major release like an OS - irritating as it is to all of us, I can imagine why they don't respond, in truth if I was running Apple, I would take the same decision : far better to ride to the rescue shortly with an upgrade along the lines of " a small number of users have reported Wifi connectivity problems apparently caused by the chipset configuration with certain types of routers...blah, blah which this latest version overcomes" - of course there will be a list of another 12 other different "minor" issues that are also now solved.

With more available cash than the US Government, I suspect my demand for my $30 back is not going to upset Big Steve very much!

My commiserations to all of you who don't have the Ethernet cable option to keep them going while this gets sorted.

The bottom line is WHY should there be any wifi connectivity issues?

Is one supposed to find out what chipset a router is everywhere to try and connect only to find they cannot?

It is absurd, and borderline criminal they released this os with these issues, and have not made any attempt to fix it or assure customers it needs fixing.

4 words will work if enough people ask it.....I WANT A REFUND.

They would argue that with the sheer number of possible configurations that an OS has to run under, that after making a major design change, many new features, etc., there is no amount of lab testing and even pre-launch testing that can cover every base and detect every possible problem that could occur and this, in fairness, would be much the same line that most product manufacturers would take whether it be software, hardware, tools or automobiles.

As nbooradley says below, the real irritation for sufferers is the total lack of response and rather than trying to hush up the existence of a Facebook page, they really should be grasping the nettle at this stage and claming things down with a "we are working hard to fix this" statement - it seems bizarre that a user like nbooradley is making more apparent effort to solve the problem for Apples customers thasn Apple themselves!

How about it boys and girls at Apple?

"Wi-Fi: No Hardware installed" here on my new macbook pro from early 2011. Tried different things like resetting SMC or PRAM. Got a kernel panic after reseting the SMC 😟 I Also cleared all Caches with Onyx and deleted the "SystemConfigration"-directory in /Libary/Preferences... nothing helped

on my way to work lion recognized the wi-fi (airport) but at work and at home it is gone... strange!!!

Apple, please release a fix for this!

Not to promising start, initially I just exchanged the cables from the mk 2 to the mk 3 and it seemed stable but then the stop starts appeared, my primary telephone socket is in a room in my garage which was a sort of refuse from a TV addicted family :-) my son uses this room now as I have been allowed back into the house ! to ensure a strong signal throughout the house I have run a network cable to a central point and added a wireless access box.

I know you probably should not rely to much on a graphical display on a speed testing site but when I run a test from the mk 3 the needle swings about wildly and sometimes stops altogether, using the wireless access point connected by the network the display is stable throughout the test, the interesting point is that the final speed results are very similar even if the one takes longer to complete. So it would seem to be a problem between the mk 3 box and the wifi in my MBP as the access point is working fine. Tomorrow I will move the computer nearer to the mk 3 and test extensivelyt to be fair to it just in case the distance/walls etc are causing the problem.

I have the same problem, that smarty airport keep searching for networks, even for networks outside my country. I found a solution that may be annoying, all you have to add an IP in DCHP for your connection then switch it automatically. To get an IP, connect your iPhone to the network, then take the IP and put inside that little smart airport.

BS

hi everyone. just wanted to add something.

i own a 2010 mba which i have updated to lion and i have been having wifi issues since day one. i tried everything in this forum and nothing worked. but today, i'm currently outstation in taipei and using my hotel room's wifi connection and everything is working so well. so i'm guessing the router chipset problem might be true.

but unfortunately, back at home, i'm using unifi, malaysia's fiber provider, which they've set up with their own firmware on the router making it impossible for me to change to a different router. i mean i could actually, disable the wireless of that router and hook up another wireless router to it's lan port. but that is so inefficient and i bet there would be performance issue there.

what can i do? any other malaysians having this problem?

I bought a new iMac and right away upgraded with Mac OS X Lion. Everytime I turn on my computer, I cannot access Internet and get a message that "WIFI card is not installed". I looked everywhere on the System Preferences but was unable to access my network. iPad was working fine so it is not my internet connection. What I need to do each time I want to use my iMac is turn on, click Restart and then Wifi is on.

Seems like many people are experiencing this issue and it just take a while cause you have to turn on your computer twice. Will this be fix soon? Otherwise, I might re-installed previous OS. Thanks!

Just t add to the numbers:

I recently bought a 15" MBP i7 cpu 8Gb ram SSD drive. Its a very powerful beast and was perfect until I upgraded to Lion.

Since the upgrade my wifi has been troublesome.

I have a 50Mb down 5Mb up internet connection. I test the speed using http://www.speedtest.bbmax.co.uk/

I have a Dell E6400 laptop running next to my MBP which reports 49989 (basically the full 50Mb) over wifi connected to my wifi router 5ghz N network. The MBP running the same tests hovers around the 3-4Mb mark sometimes jumping to approx 10Mb. sometimes web browsing pauses for a few seconds and sometimes the paue is long enough to cause a timeout. Very very frustrating. Snow leopard was fine. APPLE SORT IT OUT PLEASE.

Hi all,

I'd like to follow-up on this Atheros/Broadcom card observation, which I can indeed confirm here and which so far seems to be the most promising lead that's come up in this 27-page discussion.

I've just upgraded our home iMac (late 2009, 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo) from Snow Leopard to Lion (Mac OS X Lion 10.7 (11A511)), and this right away started causing reccurring wifi interruptions (our wifi net had until then been perfectly stable for over a year, so the cause is clearly the Lion upgrade). The iMac has an Atheros card (Atheros 9280: 4.0.55.4-P2P) in it. The interruptions affect other Macs on the net that are running either Snow Leopard or other version of Mac OSX, and to correct the problem, one must somehow restart or fiddle with wifi settings in network config on the iMac/Atheros that's running Lion, but the interruption happens again within hours, sometimes minutes. So there's clearly something about how this iMac, under Lion, regularly communicates with the wifi router that kills it or makes it hang.

Interesting thing is that I also just got a brand new mid-2011 MacBook Air, pre-installed with Lion (11A2063), sporting a Broadcom wifi card (BCM43xx 1.0(5.100.98.75.8)). If I disconnect the iMac/Atheros from our wifi net (turn wifi off), leaving only the MBA/Broadcom/Lion on the net, the net seems ok.

So to be clear, this suggests that the issue is linked to the combination of Lion(11A511)/Atheros (9280: 4.0.55.4-P2P), but doesn't happen with Lion(11A2063)/Broadcom-BCM43xx 1.0(5.100.98.75.8). Which apparently fits the patterns noted by nbooradley23.

Hope this helps someone at Apple to accelerate the fix...

Good luck to all, and despite the frustrations here, let's not forget to put things in perspective: could be worse, imagine if we were using Vista... ;-)

Still not one drop out since the router change from bt to old netgear. The reason im so proud is due to the fact that for me 2 get even 5 mins is great but 48 hours at full speed is amazing, i feel like i have just been introduced to the world of the internet. i mean children are on sky through xbox, im streaming apple tv and my misses is watching eastenders on iplayer, oh and 2 downloads are being done on playstation for games and daughter outside on ipad. oh what a beautiful peaceful world netgear has brought to myself.

My advice if it means anything, after all i have had trouble with wi fi since i bought my first mac years ago and started using different routers. spend £15 on a d834 netgear router and live your life in peace.

oh i have one question: does the airport router play up. im not even sure apple do a router, but if they do i bet lion will work perfect with the new all singin dancing apple router. i will be stunned if there own router is playing up. but there again i bet if they make a router it dont like windows.

thanks a very happy andy

Nice detective work Echfam! Let us indeed hope it helps Apple who clearly cannot resolve this issue single handed.

It's interesting that those who post here fall into one of two broad camps. There is the majority (which includes me) are surprised and not a little annoyed that the mighty Apple should have released such a sub-standard product before it was really ready. There must be a growing suspicion that once you invite the devil's (aka Intel) processor onto the scene you start seeing PC type problems creeping in.

And then there are the diehard fans for whom Apple can still apparently do no wrong. You're one of them perhaps. "Could be worse" is not exactly a ringing endorsement. If you buy a BMW that breaks down on day one, you won't be much comforted by someone smiling broadly, slapping you on the back and saying jovially: "Could be worse, think if it had been a Lada!"

I am sure this will get sorted because the Apple reputation is very much on the line - as I am sure the Apple boffins know, whatever they might be prepared to admit to publicly.

Thanks. So I wonder if that suggests that either the difference between the versions or the DNS setting is the culprit? I have my DNS set to obtain automatically from my ISP. Could my ISP be behind the curve as far as Lion is concerned?

I am not enough of a techie to know whether any of this has a bearing on why some people are as happy as Larry, like you, or fed up and miserable like me!

Yes great sleuthing EchFam-D though we can't tell apple what is exactly wrong. it does appear to be a chipset issue with certain routers. What is confusing though is I've delt with a few people who have the same issue on (some) broadcom chipsets but I am awaiting to see has their issue been resolved with some of the fixes suggested here such as the java update and others.