Q: New Macbook Air - wifi connectivity problems

I bought my forst Mac a little over a week ago - Macbook Air 13'.

Everything has been running smoothly until this afternoon when all of a sudden it stopped connecting to my wifi. I spent 2+ hrs on the phone with Apple support (+ another 2 hours reinstalling the OS that the tech advised me to do), and I have been told that it must be a router issue. Yet...all my other devices connect perfectly fine. I changed the channel from 2 to 11, and it makes no difference. BUT...Apple is still telling me it's a router problem.

I am beyond frustrated. Have any of you found exchanging the laptop for a different one helpful?

One other question -

Is this strictly an Air issue, or are Pros affected as well?

@velvetsun

They said the same thing to me. I did update the firmware on my router and even tried the MBAs with other advanced routers. Same issues.

Got two new ones and returned both. And honestly this forum has at least tried to help me than anything else!

If you still want to try some experimenting with your MBA, scroll back a few pages and try to follow all suggested methods.

As far as I know, MBP had fan, battery heat, display issues. I'm not sure of wifi issues.

@satpak

Thanks for the response.

I am feeling very discouraged since I have wanted a Mac for years and finally broke down and convinced myself to spend the $ to get one. I plan on swapping mine out tomorrow, but if I have the same issue will just return it for a refund.

Not sure why Apple is taking so long to fix this issue, unless they expect the problems to go away when the new OS is released?

Hey guys, I think I found a router setting that helps a bit when using the newer drivers (tested with the 10.8.5 ".29" driver).

I changed the "Pre-amble" setting in my netgear's advanced wireless setting from "Automatic" to "Long". Its odd that this seems to slightly help latency since according to my research this setting should in theory slightly *increase* latency.

After doing so, the pings are still somewhat high with the new driver, but they are overall more consistant and don't spike as high. Also prior to this tweak I would occasionally even get some packet loss when pinging google, and speedtest.net gave me a rather slow speed compared to the .22 driver (~10mbit, with the .22 driver and on my other laptops I very consistantly get ~22mbit).

Now I get an average of 44ms ping to my wireless router with the newest driver, which isn't ideal and still notably worse than the .22 driver, but far better than the 150ms I was getting before. There is still far more jitter with the newer driver than .22 though, but at least speeds are comparable and there's no packet loss.

Also quick question to anyone knowledgable about osx. I'm fairly new to OSX. I was just wondering about this kext workaround, I saw some posts earlier in the thread saying the workaround could potentially cause issues in the future when it comes to update. Before changing the kext, I backed up the previous one. If I wanted to go back to the original one just to make sure future updates work correctly, would copying the original kext back over (and following the rest of the instructions to set the permissions and such of course, this is what I've been doing to move between .22 and .29 drivers for testing) be enough, or should I download the 10.8.5 combo update and install that over my 10.8.5 (I'd imagine this should replace the files with the appropriate 10.8.5 versions).

Nevermind, I think those few pingtests I ran were a fluke, latency doesn't really seem improved, need to do more consecutive testing before posting next time.

The only way to get good ping is manteining a background low network activity, for example, that null ping explained before.

Btw, I started a topic on reddit, nothing of interest appeared yet though

You are correct! Just tested by downloading a large ISO and then pinging. Pings were totally normal while a large active download was going.

I feel much better about this now. I'm new to OSX so the high latencies immediately concerned me and I was convinced something was terribly wrong. A google search of this shows threads dating back to 2009 where users have discovered the same thing (pings being far lower with active download in the background). So it seems like this is a power managemenr feature that has been around for quite a while. I guess this 'feature' was actually *broken* in the .22 driver, which is why it consistant gave good pings even without active network activity.

I do feel that the power management is a bit too aggressive though, pings don't stabilize until a download has been active for a little while, which concerns me a bit, but not as much as before.

No message

Hahaha, your hope dissapeared (and mine too)

New update did not come with any wifi drivers, sorry guys

Has anyone installed the recent Mountain Lion supplemental update? If so, are you seeing any improvement regarding your wireless problem?

Wireless connectivity wasn't mentioned in the list of addressed issues, as far as I can see, so I'm not very hopeful of its being fixed by this update.

Update: just seen that wireless drivers not addressed, according to jaimehrubiks above.

Message was edited by: John Potts

Hate to be so cryptic on this but it is what it is.. Rest assured things are in the works to resolve this. The powers that be know about it. And it will be fixed.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

Just installed the latest 10.8.5 suplemental release on my 2013 MBA and my 2010 iMac.  Testing the ping time to my Airport Extreme 6th gen is see an average ping time of 1.4ms on the iMac and average of 18 ms on the MBA.  We seem to be moving in the right direction.

Although Waltw1321 seems be pretty confident, I share his opinion. 

Tested with latest update:

http://www.pingtest.net/result/87382937.png

http://www.pingtest.net/result/87383031.png

http://www.pingtest.net/result/87383247.png

http://www.pingtest.net/result/87383281.png

Ran without downloading anything in background. Seems like it may have improved some, but its really hard to tell, differences between with the update and prior aren't big enough to be conclusive.

I'm not seeing ~150ms jitter anymore at least.

edit: pings to gateway do seem conclusively better though. again, ran with no downloads in background. still not as good as .22 was but better it seems. Previously I was usually getting many 150ms or higher pings:

Last login: Fri Oct  4 07:22:48 on ttys000

Brandons-MacBook-Air:~ brandon$ ping 192.168.1.1

PING 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1): 56 data bytes

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=20.009 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=19.257 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=1.013 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=16.799 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=19.235 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=64 time=19.253 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=6 ttl=64 time=18.867 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=7 ttl=64 time=18.813 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=8 ttl=64 time=18.756 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=9 ttl=64 time=18.735 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=10 ttl=64 time=18.799 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=11 ttl=64 time=1.121 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=12 ttl=64 time=18.383 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=13 ttl=64 time=18.097 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=14 ttl=64 time=19.111 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=15 ttl=64 time=0.932 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=16 ttl=64 time=18.704 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=17 ttl=64 time=18.785 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=18 ttl=64 time=2.527 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=19 ttl=64 time=18.646 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=20 ttl=64 time=17.648 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=21 ttl=64 time=17.720 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=22 ttl=64 time=17.877 ms

seems like they may have slightly tweaked the power management or something, but can't be sure and the update didn't mention wireless anywhere.

Just to clarify, new update did not patch any wifi driver.

So your pings will stick to what they were just before. It won't even install you the last one, it keeps the one you had.

At least thats what I observed