Q: Lion WiFi Connection Problem

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.

Since Mac's are able to use wireless LAN, there are the same discussions about dropping, bad performance a.s.o, especially when major changes in OS X occur.

Go back into history with google, bing or right here, and you will see, that the same discussions pop up at every major change. Tiger - Leopard - Snow Leopard and now Lion.

And the root to the problems are NOT (or extreme rare) the new operating systems.

Wireless getting faster with each step .. from b to g to draft n to n with mimo right now.

The faster a radio transmitted network gets, the higher is the risk that radio obstacles, interferences, or mismatching network settings and configurations cause problems.

The problem mostly is based inside the network and / or in the configurations.

Remember, that Wireless networking is not as "simple" as wired networking.

There is a lot more "tech" inside and radio tricky tracky to provide a reliable network performance and stability.

Up too, there are a lot of obstacles (e.g. walls, reflections, microwaves, cordless phones) in your home or office that disturbs the radio signal or interference with it, what could cause additional traffic in your wireless network while signal strength (bandwidth) is decreased.

This again, could cause bad packets (e.g. DUP ACK) in your network, what could make a client drop the network.

Or it will cause collisions in your network, leads to decreased network capacity again and so on, until the network drops.

On the relatively small bandwidth of, for example a 811.g, wireless network is a lot of traffic all the time only to keep the network alive.

Thereby the bandwidth for user data is limited. On a 150 MB 811.n network are -if perfectly tuned- 80% of the throughput left for user data. On a standard "set all to default and the base station behind the oak trunk" network, the user data throughput will reach 50% to 60% of the nominal 150 MB speed.

Imagine, that your wifi network-highway is full packed with user data like Internet, Airplay, messenger, Skype video chat and a running youtube video on every computer in the network.

All of them hooked on the same radio stream with limited bandwith.

You may see now, that small disturbances or interferences may cause trouble on the highway.

On this, unfortunately, there is no single "Aspirin" solution to fix all network dropouts one can have.

It needs a lot of work and time, to find the bottleneck in a individual wireless network or the reasons of bad packets.

But there are some steps you can go to eventually fix your specific network problem luckily.

Best you can do to stabilize your network is optimizing your network with all effort you can give including the radio beaming, e.g. by changing the transmitters place.

So what more can you do?

• Check if other wireless Accesspoints are in your neighborhood and (important) what channel they use.
• Check if wireless phone stations are near your wireless router or the affected device, cause most cordless phones use the 2.4 GHz band.
• Eventually switch to a different channel (manual settings) at your router or phone station.
• Recommended: If your router provides such a configuration (Greenfield-Mode) and there are no 811.g systems in your house, try to set the router to 811.n only. This will reduce interferences from the "g" channels in your own network (when the n to g compatibility is disabled) and the networks surrounding you.
• If the 811.n does not mach to your setup, home or office, downgrading all connections to 811.g can also be an option to stabilize the connections.

This will reduce interferences, results in better stability of the connection and increase speed. It also helps to prevent bad network packets if a system accidentally switch the band.

Conclusion:

The better your wireless connection runs, the less will be disturbance, bad packets, collisions a.s.o in your network.

Good connection, no dropouts.

Cheers - Lupunus

Message was edited by: lupunus

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

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

pheenix93 wrote:

 

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.

 

Your new MBAir have a Broadcom chipset for WLAN and two antennas for actual 811.n services.

No alien chipset or exotic hardware so far.

The wifi hardware is the same as on the 2011 MBPro I use (except the third antenna on the MBRro) and, if the same (most likely) drivers are used with 10.6.8 and 10.7.1 the same problems should come up.

Surprise surprise, exactly the connection bull**** were talking about here, rise up with my new MBPro and I had a lot of trouble with WLAN the first days with the MBPro.

Connection and login problems to the router (a 811.g model), Internet was lousy, airplay or video streaming drops out minimum twice an hour, the MBPro could not reconnect to wireless after sleep and some more.

And, all other devices in my network works like before.

Never had such a mess with the MacBook, SmartPhone, WDTV or the WinXP machine before, except the iTunes stream drop out once or twice a day which, I thought at that time, may came from the old 811.b/g router.

So I drop the old router and bought a Airport Extreme 5th Gen., hoping a Apple only network will provide a quick fix for the problems.

Wrong horse. Some problems seems to be fixed, like the "reconnect after sleep" one but the other annoying bugs where still present.

After the common first aid do's and don't's did not solve the problems I was lucky having a couple of days off giving me the time to investigate the problems.

I put out my years of experience in troubleshooting IT-Systems for others and start a complete standard troubleshoot on the issues.

• Check involved hardware (incl. cables) of all systems hooked to the network for problems.
• Check settings and the available network options on router and all other network clients. (Expresses, WinXP PC, WDTV and SmartPhone)
• Check that ALL network clients can provide and have fixed to the best matching settings for the wanted network design.
• Check AntiVir and firewall settings on all systems using either of them. (AntiVir can cause dropout in streams like Airplay, Scrambled Firewall settings can prevent essential network packets to reach there destination)
• Check network behaviour when only one system at the time is connected to it.
• Check radio conditions and place of the base station, Mac's and Expresses.
• Swap around the Expresses and testing them with only one at the time plugged in.
• Monitor the whole network traffic during the time of Airplay dropouts or network cutoff.
• Monitor the radio of wireless network with a wifi hacking tool to catch eventually a relation in radio conditions, interferences, frequency, used channel or other surrounding wireless networks to dropouts
• Read (grep) all related logfiles for the time problem occurs from ALL systems.

Luckily, OS X have Terminal and a bash to compare files, sort out the 20 lines you need or help find 20 matching entries inside millions of lines in a 24 hour wire shark log.

After that, there was a bit of Sherlock Holmes work.

Analyzing the collected data, reading and comparing a lot of logfiles. Check manuals and google stuff to find -hopefully-, the troublemaker and a solution to fix my wireless problems.

So I followed Holmes: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth"

And, not surprisingly,

• NONE of the problems came from WLAN chipset driver or chipset hardware
• ONE problem only was related to OS X (Scrambled Keychains and network *.plist's)
• ALL other problems could get routed inside the wireless network, its infrastructure and radio conditions.

After all, I found solutions for any of my wireless network issues.

Now I have the fastest possible 811.n network for the given radio conditions in my home, with displayed 450 MB/s for the MBPro and between 270 MB/s and 300 MB/s for the other units.

• No more Airtunes drop outs
• No more video stream drop outs
• No more network cut off
• No more fading connections or bandwidth
• No more bad packets in the network
• No more disappearing units in the AirPort Utility

By the way, a friend of mine have recently get a brand new MBAir w. Lion and faced some wifi issues after unboxing the MBAir. He's a experienced tech too and did his troubleshooting homework. Neither he nor me have any wifi issue when visiting each other and let the MBPro or Air join to any of the networks.

I'm sure, that Apple can not present, and for that will never do so, a more or less simple update, firmware or bugfix solution for the problems we talk about today.

Maybe, instead of moaning doing your homework proper does the trick for most of us.

If your not a tech or experienced user, ask brother, sister, neighbor, job mate, friend, according to the knowledge the have.

If none of them are available or all have not enough skills, at least you can sit down, google, read and learn to help yourself or rent a professional.

All is better than arguing with Lion, Intel Chips the last X-Mas snow or poking with a branch in the fog like a blind in the woods trying to find a specific tree.

Cheers - Lupunus

Yawn.  Another post indicates that Apple is aware of the problem and intends to issue an update.