Lion WiFi Connection Problem

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1501 iMac fix gives us this popup:

Alert

This software is not supported on your system.

Mac OS X

Version 10.7.4

Processor 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

Memory 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3

BTW, our problem only started happening when we got a Clearwire receiver/router, and it is intermittent. Ours was happening w/ the MacBook Pro, but that has since stopped.

The intermittent problem continues to happen w/ the iMac when we start or when the machine goes to sleep and wakes up.

Another differentiator: this happens with wireless and hardwired connections alike (the iMac and receiver/router are colocated).

Thanks!

(1) Deleting a system preferences file called com.apple.aif.plist, then restarting the machine to rebuild it. This is inside Macintosh HD > Library > Preferences, which is now harder to find in Lion’s Finder because Apple has hidden your hard drive by default in the Sidebar’s list of Devices. You can use Finder’s Preferences to add Hard Drives back to the Sidebar, but based on our experiences, deleting this file doesn’t work to fix the problem.

(2) Reset your Mac’s PRAM and NVAM. This was suggested by an Apple Discussions user, and is explained in this Apple Knowledgebase document. Most reports do not suggest that this works.

(3) Reset your Mac’s System Management Controller Another suggestion from an Apple Discussions user, explained here. Again, most reports do not suggest that this works.

Based on past experiences in trying to fix major issues such as this one, we know that it’s rare that one solution works for everyone, and that readers often come up with great ideas for how to get things working again. We’re going to keep hunting for answers to this, and will update this article when we have one that works for us—did one of these ideas, or something else, work for you? Post in the comments section below.

It also depends on if you have your router set to "create" or "extend" or "participate" in the network (different routers use differnet language (possibly) and different routers have varying levels of difficulty when setting up the network). Also depends on if you have your security set to none, WEP, WPA, and WPA2. Also that your network is set up correctly or needs some tweaking. It also depends on if your using the latest firmware (provided the manufacture created firmware). It also depends on if your router is more than two years old. Take a look at this link. and read the part under the United States. There is an FCC label printed somewhere on each computer. What does your label say?

Eric491 wrote:

I just figured out that there are some problems with IPv6 and apple products, it's possible that it's the source of some of these issues.

The only ones I know are server tools. Whatever was wrong with iTunes and Airport Utilities has been fixed. If you have specifics please let us know about them.

For me it's the reason I can't connect to my airport express. I need to be able to disable IPv6 in the airport express settings, and I can't figure out how. To do it in Lion, go to terminal, then type

networksetup -setv6off wi-fi

Hopefully this will help some people.

Apple has posted this information for Snow Leopard users http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3802.

Same fix here, for the first time since moving to Lion and not downgrading the drivers I have a stable connection, more people doing the same here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3190651?answerId=18993967022#18993967022&ac_cid=tw123456#18993967

Depressingly I actually want power managment, wouldn't it be nice if there was a fix just for the Wifi power?

Typically my stability would last for 20-30 mins before a problem started, so far it's been 8 hours.

NateKH

on an iMac, problem started when I upgraded to lion, still present after upagrade to mountain lion.

1) Yes, no result

2) No option to choose 5Ghz (dlink dir-615 router)

3) Yes, and there isn't an issue from waking, it just drops signal. Have to turn off wifi then back on to reconnect

4) Yes, no result

4) same

Oddest thing, deleted and re-added my wifi network from the system prefrences. Seems to be all better. Been 10 hours and counting with no drops. This didn't work on Lion, but seems to have solved it after upgrading to ML.

Dear Gphonei,

I am glad that finally someone payed attention to what I said about changing ISP and the problem in Nagel-Alg.

But it whould be a better netiquette to cite the original idea ( as I mentioned my friend the first time I put it here:)

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3190651?answerId=19404644022#19404644022

(I have no objection, and don't get frustrated friend; It was just a friendly comment !! )

I just want this problem to be solved because I adore Apple . Just go on . I think the solution -what ever is , or at least partly- is in this article.

I should remind to those who have not seen my previous posts, after changing ISP I have not had even one drop-down in connection for nearly 10 Months.

norgard wrote:

it is a WGR614v9

Thanks for this. I have looked up the specs for your router. It only supports 802.11g, not draft n, and your data from earlier indicate 802.11g at 54 Mbps, so my premise regarding your particular wifi problem is proved false.

From your later description, it sounds like the power-saving bug is playing a role. I believe this was supposed to be addressed in 10.7.3 (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5048). However, you also said (I think) that the latest update (10.7.5: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5313) made the wifi performance worse, although the update notes specifically mention supposed "wifi reliability" improvements. Thus, I am out of ideas unfortunately.

cmitche1 wrote:

gphonei wrote:

cmitche1 wrote:

Oh, and I figured out how to change the channel - didn't work AND it doesn't solve my issues that no matter what router I'm connected to I cannot increase my download speeds.

Which model and year macbook do you have?

As an update, I made a small partition (~20 GB) on my MBP 8,1 and tested a clean install of Snow Leopard... and the download speed was great. So I reformatted the entire disk to Snow Leopard, only to find that download speeds sucked again. So I went ahead and upgraded back to Lion. THEN I partitioned the drive and installed Lion on a smaller partition just to see what would happen, and to my surprise the download speeds were WORSE! I ran it at speedtest.net and it resulted in 1.0 mb/s and a 300 mb download showed over an hour to download.

Now I'm back to Lion on my full disk and a 300 mb download takes about 1 hour via wifi and about 30 minutes via LAN. Not bad, however, AGAIN the PC at my work desk downloaded the same 300 mb file in less than 5 minutes.

What's the deal? I know it MUST be the Lion OS because it doesn't matter which wifi port I use (work, home, cafe, etc.).

I don't know what could be causing such weird problems, except for this list of things:

1. Are you sure that your internet connection is not lagging due to other load; i.e., can you do the same download at the same time on another device and see one always being considerably faster? networking bandwidth "sharing" doesn't really exist in general, no quality of service guarentees are typically recognizable in the form of "shared" bandwidth. If you can rule out that noone else is saturating the network, then that would be helpful.

2. The number of applications running, including "addons" in your browser and how the "download" is done, can create variability because of how "fast" new "read requests" from the network can be dispatched, as well as "TCP ACKs" that will cause more, higher speed streaming from the sender.

3. Your experiences with different "OSes" on the disk in different places, still makes me feel like you have something going on with your disk drive. Look at http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1509 for information on how to run hardware diagnostics to see if you can find a problem with your disk or some other part of your computer.

Let us know what you can find that's more definative and repetable. Reloading the OS on different places on the disk and getting different results could be an indication of disk surface problems. But, it could also be that you had an older version of something, or an addon doing something in your web browser.

Did you try curl or wget to do the download outside of your web browser?

James Wilde wrote:

A little further information on my researches. I created a Lion installation on my USB stick and booted from it. Neither during setup nor afterwards would it connect to the network. So I'm back to Snow Leopard for this message. And Snow Leopard is still working fine.

It's the same TP-Link router, it's the same Mac Mini, it's the same USB stick. The account details are the same. The only difference is the operating system.

To my way of thinking that means that something has changed between Snow Leopard and the version of Lion which I used for this test, and it changed a fair way into the life of Lion, as I was using Lion without problems until the upgrade that ruined everything.

As far as I'm concerned that's QED. I think I've done my bit. Maybe someone else can experiment with replacing the wifi code in a Lion or Mountain Lion install with the code from Snow Leopard, and see if you can make a working operating system. I'll definitely be in the market for a copy if anyone succeeds.

In case anyone wonders why my copy of Lion is not an original from before the problem arose, I did not learn until quite late that one could save the installer downloaded from the App Store. The original copy I installed from disappeared, as it does when it has been used. It was much later that I discovered how to save a copy, and I downloaded the second copy clearly after the problem was incorporated in the system, and made my DVD from that.

You have certainly proved that the two are incompatible with each other. The question is, which one is technically broken. The sleep proxy functionality is described at http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3774, and you might see what it has to say, to see if there is something about what you are experiencing which might reveal if this is related.

You said that it never "connected" on Lion. Did the airport bars icon on the menu bar at the top right, show grey bars, or black bars. What happened that caused you to know it was not connected? Just the grey bars, or were you trying to connect to a web page and Safari was just reporting a problem connecting?

James Wilde wrote:

You have certainly proved that the two are incompatible with each other. The question is, which one is technically broken. The sleep proxy functionality is described athttp://support.apple.com/kb/ht3774, and you might see what it has to say, to see if there is something about what you are experiencing which might reveal if this is related.

You said that it never "connected" on Lion. Did the airport bars icon on the menu bar at the top right, show grey bars, or black bars. What happened that caused you to know it was not connected? Just the grey bars, or were you trying to connect to a web page and Safari was just reporting a problem connecting?

Two mistakes in the first two sentences.

I have certainly proved that the two are NOW incompatible with each other. They weren't in the early days of Lion, not until that update. Well, if I'm being picky, it was another router I was using then, I think the Netgear. I bought the TP-Link a good bit after the problem started in the hope that there was something wrong with the Netgear and I needed a new router.

And the other mistake: the question is not which one is technically broken. I really don't give a ****. The question is why I can NO LONGER use my kit, which worked a dream before. There was nothing wrong with Apple's wifi system until they 'fixed' it. But, hey, there's another advantage in going back to Snow Leopard: I now have the two little arrows in the scroll bar. Goodness knows, they didn't take up much real estate on my screen, but they're invaluable in a long document. But Apple 'fixed' that, too, and despite another thread in here, not quite as long as this one, I see no sign of their return. Maybe they have and I haven't heard about it.

As to how I know it wouldn't connect, if I remember correctly the bars were grey, but every time I input my WPA2 key, the window shook its head almost immediately and said something about the connection having taken too long to establish. Windows and Linux give it a good 15 seconds before they give up.

As a consumer as well, I can appreciate that your stuff is not working, and the manufactures of the stuff have held you hostage in the sense that its not working.

I am not trying to dismiss your frustration nor your right to have stuff you paid for, working as it should. What I'm trying to do, is get you to focus on where the problem is at, so that you are pointing your finger and spending your time and money on solutions rather than "work arounds" or "hopeful fixes".

There are many people here, who have experienced WiFi issues. There have been a wide range of causes. Some people think that the problem is "one problem", while there are so many considerations, that there are many things to consider.

You said the airport login window "shook" to tell you "no", immediately and you typed the correct password. That implies another behavior mentioned here. It seems that your router has an incorrect implementation of WPA vs WPA2 in the router, and it has not correctly identified which mode it is in, and your MAC is using the wrong password "encoding". Try setting up WPA and WPA2 separately on your router to see if that fixes the problem.

gphonei wrote:

You said the airport login window "shook" to tell you "no", immediately and you typed the correct password. That implies another behavior mentioned here. It seems that your router has an incorrect implementation of WPA vs WPA2 in the router, and it has not correctly identified which mode it is in, and your MAC is using the wrong password "encoding". Try setting up WPA and WPA2 separately on your router to see if that fixes the problem.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4199 has all the details on what Apple believes needs to be checked and/or validated in your router configuration steps. Notice that the first is "update the firmware to the latest".

I don't believe ths is a solution. About 1/2 of my Apple devices were already set to ask to join a network. This happens to me several times a day now. This never happened in the past. I posted an extensive discussion about this here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5991506

This DOES smack of a Microsoft type of problem. Since my wife's iPhone 5 and my iPhone 5 as well as my Macbook pro are over a year old and never had the problem before about a month or 2 ago, I can only conclude that it has something to do with upgrading to OSX Mavericks, my getting an iPad, my upgrade to iOS7 or ??????!?

So far the Apple store dudes, have done the following.

• Confirmed that my hardware is there, but wi-fi will not turn on.
• after confirming I had a backup they did the "Trick" which was to wipe all setting folders. Still the same problem.
• We went back to a full install fo Lion, but after I loaded my Adobe products and rebooted, the w-fi went away.
• I think it was the install of Java Runtime that caused it (just speculation on my part) but i see all sorts of chatter on the Adobe site about only manually installing the runtime do not install using apples updater. I tried that and still no luck

I don`t get the point about accusing third-party-software:

• The wi-fi-components of my iMac (mid 2010 / 3,2 GHz) come from? Right: Apple!
• The new OS working hand in hand with the wi-fi-components of my iMac comes frome? Right: Apple!

So - is there anyone who can explain to me how third-party-software (except the router-firmware which is actual and the same as under SL in my case) can influence the stability of the wi-fi-connection in a well build OS?