BUG: Mountain Lion kills wifi speed when using airplay or time capsule

Confirm the version # of the kext installed in /System/Library/Extensions. In the past, I've had the kext installer silently fail when installing a kext.

That was it. It wasn't removing / backing up the old (um new) one to install the 4.2.1

So what's the evaluation after several days with the new version and the rejigged patching strategy? Does everything seem to be working okay? (I've held off from updating so far.)

With the kext and airportd swap, everything seems to be working okay for me.

After applying Briellie's fix of the airportd and the retro 4.2.1 kext's, I found that rebooting and clearing my caches has resolved the issues.

briellie,

What is the kext swap and how do you get it? I have the airportd one.

Nate

Here is a zip file with the 10.6.8, 10.7.3, airportd, and kext utility. Back up the existing kext, drag the replacement one you want to use and drop it on the kext util and it will automatically install it.

Seems to be working fine so far. Thanks, folks.

My 17" MBP from 2010 is working fine with 10.8.4, as it did with 10.8.3. With Airplay going, Time Capsule backups are fast.

I need your help please. I am stuck at "A Network Timeout Occured". I did the kext install of 10.6.8 on my mid-2007 MBP. I'm not sure what to do with the airportd part. what do i do with that file?

apple made a change in airportd that would cause the kext swap to make wifi refuse to link up with a timeout error.

After i run airportd I still have the timeout error. This is driving me crazy. Thank You in advance for any assistance.

matt,

Did you download the 10.8.3 version of airportd from Briellie earlier in this thread? If so, then you need to do the following:

1. Turn off wifi.

2. In the terminal, type or paste the following command:

sudo mv /usr/libexec/airportd /usr/libexec/airportd.old

3. Hit Return and enter your admin password.

4. Now type this partial command, followed by a space: sudo cp

5. Take the airportd you had downloaded from this thread and drag it onto the terminal right after the "sudo cp " part and then,

6. Type /usr/libexec/airportd after that.

7. HIt Return

8. Turn on wifi.

9. Reboot

The Terminal commands just make a backup copy of your current airportd (which stands for Airport daemon) by renaming it to airportd.old and then copies the downloaded version into the directory /usr/libexec/.

That worked perfectly Gunny Sack! Thank You so much for helping! genius!

Thanks for your help, Gunny Sack and briellie! I'm running OS X 10.8.4 on my 2007 MacBook Pro and I'm using the 10.7.3 kext and the 10.8.3 airportd helper app now. Finally Time Machine doesn't decrease the Wi-Fi speed anymore. However, I noticed two things:

Firstly, now I'm connected via 2,4 GHz compared to 5 GHz before I swapped the kext. My access point supports both frequencies and it would be nice if I could use the 5 GHz connection because seemingly only then mm MacBook uses full 300 Mbit/s transmit rate (in theory; with real transfer rates much lower, of course).

Secondly (and more importantly), my Wi-Fi connection seems to stall when I'm not using it. Say, I open a longer article on a web site, start to read it and after a few minutes I can't open any other sites. The Wi-Fi icon still shows all four “bars” and I still have an IP address.

In Console the following message is repeated once every minute:

24.06.13 12:21:53,000 kernel[0]: en1: BSSID changed to 24:65:11:XX:XX:XX

The BSSID belongs to my regular Wi-Fi network. When I disable and reenable Wi-Fi everything is back to normal.

Did any of you notice these issues as well?

lenn4rd,

Do an SMC reset of your laptop. If, after that, you're still having the same problem, paste the following command into the Terminal and post the results back here:

kextstat -kl | awk '!/com\.apple/{printf "%s %s\n", $6, $7}'

Gunny Sack,

thanks for your tip. I reset the SMC but the Wi-Fi connection still stalls. I ran the command which I think returns any non-Apple kexts. I don't have any, so the command doesn't output anything.

Unless you happen to have other suggestions I think I'll switch back to the vanilla 10.8.4 kext and will have to do my Time Machine backups over wired ethernet until Apple fixes this issue (not very likely) or I can afford a recent MacBook Pro (also not very likely 😉).