Lion WiFi Connection Problem

I've noticed something else about these strange Lion dropouts. When my Lion iMac drops it's wifi connection, it seems to be corrupting all the other devices on the network, which simultaneously lose their connections as well. The other devices (non-Lion) can only rejoin once the iMac reconnects (sometimes on its own, sometimes by toggling wifi power). If I put the iMac to sleep all issues with the other devices go away. Very strange...

Adding a new network location andsetting a manual IP address resolves the issue with me on some routers, otherwise maintaining a constant 'ping' seems to maintain the connection in some situations. A few other ideas here:

http://osxdaily.com/2011/07/22/wifi-dropping-in-os-x-lion-fixes/

This clearly only effects some routers and Mac combinations, but I can't find any consistency between brands other than Linksys being the most reliable.

Va bene tutto, ma perchè non sistema Apple?

Io non voglio pasticciare sul mio computer e magari combinare qualcosa di male!

Comunque ho verificato sull'ultimo back up che ho di Snow Leopard il Firmware era il: 9280.2.1.4.6 e funzionava: questo conferma che con Lion il nuovo Firmware non funziona.

Io farei qualcosa solo se fosse possibile fare un aggiornamento o un downgrade solo del Firmware.

Buona giornata!

Hi Installed Lion and it caused so many problems i could not believe that it was an apple product, Time Machine does not work, none of the remote apps on our 3 phones in the house work my Apple TV's don't work, iMac will not connect to internet on waking, every thing i try to fix i only make other things worse! have given up till Apple patch this piece of crap. Got the Mac working to a degree but when i come down in the morning i have to clean up the mess from wake up, i moved away from PC because of this kind of thing! wish i was still running SL but am not brave enough to revert i may not have a fuctioning Mac after!

having helped a friend downgrade for other reasons, I can tell you that the only way it will work without making you utterly crazy is if you have a back up of your system from when it was on snow leopard rather than one you are about to make before you wipe everything etc

We didn't in part because it was about a week before he gave up and he had a ton of stuff he'd been working on during that time a a bunch of emails etc. The emails in particular were a huge issue because it turns out that Lion totally changes how Mail stores emails and the Snow Leopard version of Mail couldn't read the messages. It was a total mess trying to find the messages during the in between after we restored his last SL mail box set up.

You could try what I'm going to try which is partitioning off a chunk of my drive and putting Snow Leopard on it to see if I can at least get my wifi working correctly. My theory is that perhaps something is broken in Lion's airport utility and it isn't updating my router. If I can get the updated IP etc loaded in Snow Leopard and I set the Lion drive to never sleep the hard drive with luck it will stay connected. I'll be keeping my desktop computer still hard lined since I have an extreme but right now my roommate's laptop, our apple tv, our phones and my ipad are offline and we'd like them working

Hi, I had this problem for a month after purchasing my new MacBook. Daily phone calls to Apple support resulted in nothing more than reinstalling operating systems and trying many of the suggestions listed in this thread already. In the end my broadband provider suggested changing the router encryption to WEP instead of WPA. This simple fix worked and I have had no wireless issues since. Told Apple about the solution and was told they they normally recommend WPA so thought I would post here in case they do not pass on to other customers.

Same vanishing disks and dropped wifi problem(s) here, thought it might have something to do with auto-switching between 802.11n/g/b as I have other flavors of 802.11 connecting to the Airport Extreme. Thanks for the tip about option-clicking the Airport Menu Bar Icon! Interestingly, the problems got worse after updating the computer (MBAir) to 10.7.1...

I then forced my Macbook Air to connect @5GHz, no problems since...🙂

Here's what I did:

Airport Utility / Airport / Wireless / Wireless Network Options / checked "5GHz Network Name" and made it something different than the previous SSID / Update

System Preferences / Network / Wi-Fi / Advanced / + / <Add new 5GHz Network> / <Drag it above the old one> / OK / Apply

I have no problems since the installation of 10.7.1, but maybe you guys would be interested into an Apple application that could you help to figure out what is going on.

Fire up a terminal and type

open "/System/Library/CoreServices/Wi-Fi Diagnostics.app"

This Apple software can also send e-mails with diagnostics attached. Hope this helps.

Hello,

I'm in the same boat. I upgraded to Lion on my iMac a few weeks ago and since then my wi-fi won't stay connected for more than 5 minutes. I have to turn off wi-fi and then turn it on again to have a connection. So doing this a million times a day is counter productive.

I've read through many posts but my head is spinning because of all the suggestions, theories and even some contradictions. It's really too bad Apple has left it's users so defenseless... I'm sure none of us have the time to be on the forum scouring though 48 pages of postings.

I'm not a real techy person.... I have a hard time understanding some of the suggestions and I'm afraid I'm going to screw up my computer even more.

I'm using an Airport Extreme (the cone). My wi-fi is set to WPA 2 Personal and DHCP. I tried doing the manual DHCP but I lost my connection entirely.

If anyone has any updated ideas, I'd very much appreciate it.

Thanks!

Hi Bugfixer...Can you explain how to use that app? I'm a complete idiot with computers, but I have a new MBP that came with Lion and am having this disconnect problem. Are others with newer MBP's having this problem, or is it more of a problem for people that are upgrading to Lion? Thanks in advance.

mauryr wrote:

This is not a wifi technical issue, it's a driver problem that was inherited with Lion.

I dont think so.

If it where a Lion driver problem, there must be the same issue everytime anew when Panther, Tiger, Leoparda nd Snow Leopard where rolled out.

It's true, and it seems to be largely specific to the Atheros chipset which was probably updated or rewritten for Lion (or maybe it should have been, and was not.) Regardless, considering the vast number of people that had no issues at all until the upgrade, and downgrading solves it, it's pretty clear where it came from - and it's clearly not due to wifi reliability, speed, channel, or anything else.

@lupunus: If you think it's a problem of the Wi-Fi Configuration, tell me, why all of my other devices (3x iPhone, 1x iPad, 1x Samsung Notebook, 1x Acer SFF PC, 1x Lenovo Notebook, 1x self-build PC) working without any problems?

Only my new MacBook Air (13", i7, 256GB SSD) have many problems with Wi-Fi Connection. Sometimes i can't establish a connection or the Connection drop every 10-30 minutes. 😟

Imho, I hope Apple will fix this problem fast...

Sebastian

mauryr wrote:

It's true, and it seems to be largely specific to the Atheros chipset

Most Mac's I'v see within the last year, had a Broadcom chip for wLAN, including my early 2008 MacBook and my 2011 MacBook Pro.

What Mac model you are using?

jjrolex,

I'm now far away from the Mac, but the first option that is given by the app is to show the signal/noise ratio of your WiFi connection. The signal must stay as up as possible while the noise should stay as low as possible. After some time you can say if there is or not a good connection or not.

The other options are necessary to the engineers to catch up what is going on on the air, what packets are exchanged between your mac and the router, so you can easily forget them.

You can find a list of the functionalities here:

http://macs.about.com/od/LionTipsNtricks/qt/Os-X-Lion-Wi-Fi-Diagnostics.htm

Message was edited by: Bugfixer