Q: New Macbook Air - wifi connectivity problems

Having issues with my 2013 MBA now too but only seems to have happened after the latest firmware update.

https://discussions.apple.com/message/23413025#23413025

When is Apple going to do something about this? As somebody mentioned a bit earlier in this thread a Macbook Air without working wifi is pointless.

Thank you for the wifi driver rollback fix, solved my latency issue too!

the macbook air wifi situation is so utterly lame....please fix it apple, come on

I see the ping issue but anytime i download or watch a video the pings go back to super good latencies. I don't really see any REAL WiFi issue with the ping latency though and if I never bothered looking at it, my Wi-Fi seems to work just fine. Have you guys had the same experience or do you guys see some real issues that affect usablilty ?

Yeah, VoIP and remote desktop.

And gaming

I see the ping issue but anytime i download or watch a video the pings go back to super good latencies. I don't really see any REAL WiFi issue with the ping latency though and if I never bothered looking at it, my Wi-Fi seems to work just fine. Have you guys had the same experience or do you guys see some real issues that affect usablilty ?

@ wifiguru: I am one of the people who had no connectivity issues out of the box. I tried Skype, Facetime, HD video streaming, downloading, etc and everything worked flawlessly. I tried all of these on every driver, from .22 to the latest.

Even so, I think the lack of an explanation from Apple of why this latency exists and the fact that no Windows has it (ping values ~1 ms) led most of us to believe that this is a software (driver) problem. The only driver that has no latency is .22, so we manually reverted to it.

You might ask me/us: "Why did you revert to .22 driver if you had no problems?" It is a good question and the short answer is above.The long one is next. The first reason is the lack of communication from Apple: if there is something unclear, ambiguous, the public always assumes the worst. So, in our minds (at least) there is a problem. And this idea is reinforced by the performance of the Windows computers tested in the same environment with very low, "normal" latency. On top of all that you add the "experts" (I'm not saying that they are not), the people who are engineers and/or know something about computers. They came and reinforced (posting here,on the forum) the idea that is something wrong.

Just to be clear: I'm not saying that the latency is normal, I'm not saying that the "experts" are not really experts (I am sure that they know what they are talking about), I just explained why a lot of us reverted to .22 driver even if we could see no sign of any problem. The situation could've been avoided by Apple with a simple, short statement: "We know there is a latency problem, we are working on it. We expect the next week/month to have a patch" or "Many users noticed a latency in wifi performance. Let us explain why this is not an issue and how the driver is designed to work, bla, bla ,bla. This are the benefits of having this: bla, bla ,bla".

hi, it may help that you set your router's authentication to wpa2. i did that and so far it has worked.

@raducan.mihai:  I agree with you. As I said before I am a newbie to Mac world, and I am still holding on to buy an MBA after reading all the threads here.(Yes, I've read all!)  Now, since new MBP and OS are just around the corner I will wait further. It is my thinking that when there is a problem (in electronics and its software) we should approach to its solution from the bottom (protocol). In other words, fixing a problem (hw or sw) is not statistics.

I can reliably fail my wifi by plugging in a USB Windows installation memory stick. It stays disconnected after I unmount the usb stick for a few minutes if I leave it plugged in, However if I force remove it by pulling it out without dismounting first, the wifi immmediately starts working again.

I solved momentounesly removing device configuration in the network settings of Mac, and adding new Ethernet or WI-FI device. It solved my connectivity problems!!!

Hope well.

Confirmed. I had a Lexar 16GB USB 3.0 stick plugged it and when I unmounted it, unplugged it from the device and turned wifi back on I was able to connect again. Any idea why a USB stick would be causing issues with the wifi like this? As my first Mac this is a horrible experience and I never had any problems with timing out before this last update. As far as I'm concerned this is absolutely unacceptable and I will be talking to Apple about compensation.

I've conducted a number of tests and as soon as I plug the USB stick back in to the MBA, I lose all connection. Once I remove it, either by unmounting it and then removing it or just removing without unmount, the wifi instantly comes back. This is very frustrating as all my vacation photos are exported to the stick as are a few games, but I cannot play them or view the files if I want to maintain an internet connection.

Maybe it's because of this: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/io/universal-serial-bus/usb3-frequency-in terference-paper.html

I didn't know that USB 3.0 could cause interference with the 2.4 GHz band. That's strangly intruiging. I'll read the rest of the paper at a later time, but suffice to say that this should be looked in to as a possible common cause unless someone has looked in to the issue with no USB devices plugged in.