New Airport Time Capsule Dropping Wifi/Internet with 7.7.1

So I read pretty much this whole thread. Has there been any resolution to this issue?

Thanks,

AJ

ajnealey wrote:

So I read pretty much this whole thread. Has there been any resolution to this issue?

Thanks,

AJ

Do you have a TC with problems?? Or are you planning on buying one and want to know how reliable it will be??

There is no one size fits all answer.

For lots of people they must work ok.. otherwise the thread would be 90 pages long not 9.

eg Yosemite wireless issues has reached 90 pages.

Re: OSX Yosemite Wifi issues

And that is the other side of it.. where are these problems coming from.. the router or the client??

I am on my third TC.. first was dead inside a week.. the second was a simply low wireless output. not able to seriously account for it. I didn't bother for a while then a cheap one came up second hand and I jumped in again.. thinking I would pull it apart if it was bad.. and behold.. it is excellent.. signal as high as any of the Asus or Netgear top line models I test.

If you buy one.. simply thrash it for the two weeks you get before you cannot return.. If it performs well keep it.. otherwise just return it as unsuitable.

There just seems to be too much variation to give a blanket answer.

It's well past replacement.. and it is seriously outclassed (wireless and router at least) by products from Asus and many other companies. So if you jump in do so with your eyes wide open.

Yes, get rid of the SB 6121/SB 6141 and replace it with a Zoom 5341J. That fixed my problems after trying 2 different Time Capsules with both the 6121 and the 6141. Both SB modems caused the SB->Time Capsule link to freeze up every night, requiring a reboot of one or both.

Awesome post, and exactly the behavior and process I just followed with my Xfinity modem/router combo device. I moved into my house around the time of this post, and got this Xfinity router. It is interesting that I didn't have any problems with 2 AppleTV devices, or numerous other phones or tablets. I only seemed to have an issue with my macbook pro.

The difference seems to be all in the IPv6 implementation. I initially had the ATC in link-local mode, but otherwise it was setup as discussed above. The xfinity modem was also acting as a router, I just disabled the wifi and let my ATC handle that function. In this setup I had my macbook setup to also use link-local only mode for IPv6, and it always connected to the ATC via a wireless network hosted by the ATC.

Whatever was happening in that exchange must have been horribly bad. What I noticed is that wifi would always stay connected, but the internet connection would drop out from time to time. It seemed to always happen during long running conversations, or I noticed it more during things like Pandora streaming. Sitting hours on end working on grad school projects just made me loose my mind as I saw this issue continue to happen.

I could always, and I mean always, fix the problem by turning off the wifi and then turning it back on, or by switching between 2.4 or 5 GHz networks (I separated them in a desperate attempt to figure out what was happening). I lived with that until I finally decided to monkey with the IPv6 settings on the ATC, because one day I had had enough of this mess.

After noticing that the Xfinity router had IPv6 stuff set, I set the IPv6 mode on the ATC to tunnel mode. When the ATC rebooted I lost access to it, and it wouldn't hard reset. I had to factory reset it. After the reset the ATC had the settings shown above, and wouldn't you know it, the thing has been working perfectly.

Here is the hardware version of the Xfinity modem/router.

Here is the software version of the Xfinity modem/router.

Here are the basics for my ATC.

Once I followed the steps above, it changed my whole life. Years of dealing this issue, and I think the whole time it was related to my avoidance of the IPv6 stuff. Ironically I had forced the link-local only mode as a result of another thread related to network drops and how to resolve them.

Hopefully this helps someone else dealing with the issue.

I've found this thread after having a strange wireless problem and after changing pretty much everything, it must either be config of the TC or the way wireless is implemented.

I've had some of those problems listed above where its just strange behaviour around being able to join the network or it drops, but those aren't the biggest issue. What seems to be happening is that the wireless is dropping Citrix Receiver traffic very frequently. My session is dropping sometimes 5/6 times an error due to network timeouts. It doesn't happen if I connect to the TC over Ethernet and when the Citrix drops, everything else is unaffected.

The laptop on Citrix also works fine over wireless when out and about on various networks and we've swapped all the kit in the house including the TC and its still happening.

Does anyone have any advice about what I could try, or should I just cut my losses and replace the TC with a router from a third party? There doesn't seem to be any meaningful logs on the TC to at least give me a hint of what's going on.

Thanks!

Does anyone have any advice about what I could try, or should I just cut my losses and replace the TC with a router from a third party?

You can still use the TC in the network for TM backups.. but simply take away its routing which is and has always been problematic..

Just buy a different brand router.

@mikeadams

I think you first need to ascertain whether your wireless is dropping due to interference or frequency over-crowding in your workspace. Often wireless environments get quickly over-crowded as soon as you get a few Wi-Fi Access Points battling to share the same frequencies. Few play well together and a lot of them will shift frequencies in order to utilise what they think are less crowded/noisey frequencies- and simply cause the other Access Points to go from perfectly good operation to a series of frustrating and ongoing random drop-outs (until they shift frequency too, and throw the problem back at the AP that shifted/caused the problem in the first place)

Also, you need to remember that RDP and Citrix's Metaframe protocols are not very tolerant of dropped packets, let alone constant disconnections and the associated (grand amounts of) packet loss. So you may lose a session but find that your Wi-Fi is up and appears to be working just fine.

It can be all too easy to read threads like this and see your issues as similar enough to indicate hardware failures when in all probability, these are nothing to do with root cause in your case. I say this as these TCs are very reliable have great hardware in them and last for years. In our place we have three, >5 year old time capsules, all heavily used and none have faults like everyone describes here.

There a re a lot of posts in this thread that raise very generic connectivity issues, and a good number can and probably have solved their problems already by simply configuring their TC, or their computer's adapter properly. Soem would even get frustrated and change it for a device that runs with different radio settings and/or operational logic.

However there are some problems described in an ongoing way here which are probably hardware or firmware related.

For example, if you have a problem with your TC's WiFi network going offline, or DNS lookups failing after a certain period (often this just causes web pages to time out), it is very likely that a hard reset (e.g. pressing down the recessed button on the back- until you hear the it begin to restart*).

* Do not do this unless you know what you are doing (ie research how/RTM/know the risks of resetting your TC) as data or your Internet access could be lost.

Doing this means you have to setup the device again, but the configuration will all be re-written from scratch. My experience is that several of the updates seem to result in the TC getting less reliable. I have had great success in resetting and re-configuring each TC using the Airport utility, and probably works as a hard reset ensures the version of the firmware that writes the configuration file is the same as the firmware that reads it, reducing the chances of an operational failure/software exception occurring due to some configuration parameters that have not been well enough tested, and ultimately cause the TC to go offline.

Given that the TC doesn't get many updates, and re-configuring one from scratch is so simple, my update process now follows the rule: Never continue using the previous config after the update.

However your problem sounds more like intermittent radio connectivity issues (which will drop your Metaframe sessions like a stone) than these, less common, problems.

So to be clear for anyone not wanting to trawl through this thread:

If your TC was working fine firmware on an earlier firmware and after upgrading your TC drops starts dropping offline but remains powered on and file-shares accessible, it may appear to have lost its internet connection via the ethernet/cable LAN, and its Wi-Fi network may well disappear altogether.

A solution in this case is a hard reset (see the manual).

After doing this which the new configuration you create will more than likely solve the problem. (Something about configurations created by older firmware versions has proven on numerous occasions to cause problems at some point in the future with new versions).

Best practice approach when a new firmware comes out is to update your TC, then hard reset it and use Airport Utility to reconfigure it. Note: If you want to avoid problems connecting with Wi-Fi clients, do not reset it using the same Access Point credentials- i.e. set a new SSID and change the Wi-Fi password/s. And ideally/for good measure, create a new admin password too.

Note: This has been the case between several firmware versions up to and including 7.67.