WIFI Packet Loss/Jitter MacBook Air 11 & LION OSX 10.7.1

I started using computers more than 30 years ago when I was 5, I had my first IBM PC at the age of 10 and have never had any interest in paying over the odds for an Apple mac mainly because I saw the Mac as a kind of "Can't open nothing", one mouse buttoned retard of the computer world.

That is, until now.

I set up an online business 3 years ago and rented a dedicated server and set the whole business up in a cloud, so to speak. Having done that, all I needed a laptop for was a remote desktop connection and to run a SIP phone (Internet phone).

My PC based laptops had almost nothing installed on them, and I wasn't using software on the laptop itself, I was using remote desktop, so - why not try a MAC? The new Macbook Air 11 is small, light and made of metal and glass so should be robust enough to travel with me.

I have to say, this was the worst move I've ever made.

I opened the new shiny macbook and the first thing I noticed was that the internet seemed hit and miss. Moving around the room I managed to find a spot whereby pages woud load quickly. Strange, my £200 acer laptop was sh.t fast everywhere in the house. No matter, I packed it back away and carried on working on the Windows machine.

I've come to Newquay this week, and i've started to try and use the Macbook again in a hotel. The wireless signal in the room is low, and speedtest shows about 1 meg down and 3/4 meg up. That may sound bad to you, but remote desktop uses about 5k/sec (modem dial up speed) and the softphone, well, my Asterisk VOIP setup is confugured to use the GSM codec so that's 8k/sec each way + overheads.

This whole setup was deliberately designed to be "thin" so I can travel with ease and work on bad connections like USB internet sticks.

Anyhow, the Macbook was unable to hold a stable connection to the remote desktop or SIP phone, even though the speed test showed a whopping 1 meg up and down. What you may not be aware of is that there is more to a connection than the speed, there is the quality as well. How many packets are lost / how much "jitter" is on the line.

Anyhow, we're not living in the 3rd world, I ran a PINGTEST and it showed a small amount of jitter but told me the line was class B, online games may suffer but voip should be fine.

I unpacked the Acer, placed it in exactly the same spot as the Apple had sat in and it worked beautifully with 1 bar of wireless signal, all day long. Phone calls were clear.

So you know now what I'm thinking. I'm sitting here with my £200 acer because I can't use the £1500 macbook air 11. I paid nearly sixteen hundred pounds for this piece of .... and it doesn't ...... work. Time to contact Apple support.

2nd Mistake!

Representitive 1: - Told me that I can't compare the Macbook Air to the Acer, the Acer has Google Chrome and everybody knows Google Chrome is the fastest browser. I was told there was nothing more he could do, its probably a bad line at the hotel. When I explained the Acer works fine for voip I was told well, maybe it is getting a better signal. I explained the Acer has the cheapest possible parts inside it and paid 1500 for this macbook, expecting it to have quality parts inside and was told I'd paid for the size, because its so small but its not considered "powerful". Apple do you train your staff? Clearly not.

Thank god I wasn't paying to talk to this moron.

Representitive 2: - Had no idea what packet loss or Jitter was, got me to do a speedtest and said that looks fine. Then he got me to remove the WIFI adapter and re add it in the network settings.

Guess what, nothing changed, its still the same hardware and software.

Representitive 3: - Still not really understanding "quality" issues with the networking interface, I was asked to install the latest Java client. I did it, only because I wanted to comply with Apples wishes so they'd help me, but they weren't helping and Java has nothing to do with the network adapter, so that was useless advice too.

Apple seem to have no idea there is a problem, even though Google has pages and pages of people saying the same as me, and their own discussion forums have thousands of people complaining https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2664670?start=0&tstart=0

Finally, late yesterday whilst speaking to d.ck head number 3 at Apple support, we found a forum post talking about a fix, 10.7.1 update. I told d. head number 3 about the update and he suggested I applied it. So I did and everything looked great, for a whole evening.

This morning, I switched on again and the same thing, slow remote desktop, choppy unusable phone. Remember the phone needs less than 20k for a conversation, thats 0.2 meg. Speedtest again showing a whole meg both ways.

I called apple support again, this time being a little forceful, and I've asked for this to be escalated, but the bottom line is - they have no fix, they don't aknowledge this as a problem and I was told LION is new, so maybe it's got a bug..

I told the guy on the phone this is a network driver issue, the intermittency of the problem shows that and the Apple's lack of settings for the network adapter means the unit is autonegotiating with the router and choosing speed and duplex settings on its own. Sometimes it does that correctly, other times not and the connection although fast has a lot of noise / packet loss / corruption.

I've found a workaround, you put the unit to sleep and wake it up again and it runs fast until the next shutdown. Not really acceptable seeing as I was paying for "the cream of the crop".

I will definately not be recommending Apple products, and i'll certainly not be replacing the Windows laptops in my business with Apple's toytown system- i'd go out of business if I had to rely on this.

All there is left now, is to look at Boot camp and see if I can wipe this waste of space linux hack from the unit and install Windows 7.