Why does my macbook pro report the signal strength of the best access point but connect to a random one with the same name?

Question

Why does my macbook pro report the signal strength of the best access point but connect to a random one with the same name?

Problem: I am a new mac user and my late 2011 MBP with Lion connects to random enterprise wifi access points often with crappy signal when there are access points of the same name available with better signal. I called support back when I had apple care, and the support folks were horribly incompetent. After extentive testing I know it isn't interference like they were wont to claim. So, I am hoping maybe you folks can answer a couple questions...

Question 1: Have any of you experienced this problem and found a way to make Lion reliably connect to the access point with the strongest signal?

Question 2: Are the engineeers at Apple as incompetent as the folks working the phones at Apple care, or could this possibly be part of the design for some odd reason? If part of the design, I am curious what the benefits are and how those are better than the alternative?

Thanks!

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.5)

Posted on Nov 9, 2012 1:24 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

silvergc

Level 4

1,002 points

Nov 9, 2012 2:12 PM in response to AlChEmistBill

Strongest signal does not necessarily mean best network to connect. A good strong signal with 20 users connected could have worse performance that a weaker signal and significantly fewer users. Remember that the bandwidth is shared amoung all connected users. I'm not knowledgable of the algorithms used for network connection, but it is not always clear which is the best wireless subnet to connect to.

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Answer 2

Nov 9, 2012 2:48 PM in response to silvergc

A balance between users and signal strength is interesting, and should be a factor the engineers use. I should probably add that when things are so bad I can't stand it anymore, I toggle the wifi on and off a few times and when I finally connect to one of the APs with a better signal to noise ratio, things get better... Anyway, signal and users are correlated. The more users you have connected, the more interference/noise you'll have. I probably should have been more precise in my vocabulary and used signal/noise ratio instead of implicitly normalizing the noise.

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