Q: mac osx 10.9 Mavericks wifi issue

I cannot speak to the fix sudo suggests but my recent experience adding a wireless dongle to a old Macbook is nothing less than remarkable. And I think might looking into as a patch for those with continued conductivity problems. Besides my 2013 MacAir I have an old 2008 white book. I added a new SS hard drive, doubled the ram, added a new Broadcom wireless extreme card as the old one was barely limping and then did a new clean install of 10.6.8. The book runs very well now but I was still not satisfied with the range I was getting in the house even with a new Airport express router. I thought about putting in a another new Broadcom card but for what reason as it may be the antenna or who knows what. But it still did not have the range it had in 2008/9.

So I bought a $12 Edimax EW7722UTn V2 wireless router.  This works only on 2.4 up to 300 Mbs but they have a unit that is AC compatable and is dual band. After easily installing it I took the book to the far end of the house when no way this Macbook worked before. With this wirelesss adapter it was downloading at 144 Mbs on 2.4 channel 6.  Now the airport express will not produce more than 150 Mbs on 2.4 and you need to go to 5 to get higher speeds.

So the bottom line is the tranmission rate of this USB wireless router is faster at the far end of the house than the Broadcom internal card is when used right next to the airport express base station.  Plus the switch over when my internal wireless card drops the single to the Edimax dongle is seamless. I went to activity monitor and it was using only 0.2% of power.

Either this dongle (which also has a separate antenna wired to usb to extend range)

or the EW-7822UAC-AC1200 which is dual band AC compatable and has a theorectical Mbs > 800.

I have no relationship to this company but an amazed at this small adapter.

If using an external wireless dongle fixes the sleep / wake wireless problem, then it is obvious that there is a problem inside the MacBook (either with the Broadcom card or the antenna placement)

I am suspicious of the Broadcom card because it has both 802.11 wireless and Bluetooth on the same card which increases the possiblity of interference in the 2.5 Ghz band.

And we know, turning off Bluetooth fixes the problem.

I am suggesting this as possiblity. My Mac Air Mavs OS X  wirless is fixed (although it occasionally hangs for 2 seconds on the dreaded ! once in awhile). I am running Snow Leopard 10.6.8 on the old Mac Book as it is not capable of using Mavs. I might be wrong about using a wireless dongle because I do not have a mal-funtioning Mavs to try it on.But this dongle not only seamlessly worked when the Broadcom card dropped the single but I could just shut wifi off and just run the Macbook off the wireless dongle without a hitch. So if someone used this dongle and disconnected their wifi on this device and still had connectivity issues then???? What does that say? I dunno. Has anyone tried it? This was a $12 shipping included fix for a 6 year old MacBook on Snow Leopard. I can now stream online video from a far room in the house where before I could not even connect to the net.

I will get a wireless dongle at Best Buy and test on my MacBook Air

richlove wrote:

 

I am suspicious of the Broadcom card because it has both 802.11 wireless and Bluetooth on the same card which increases the possiblity of interference in the 2.5 Ghz band.

And we know, turning off Bluetooth fixes the problem.

I disagree.

Regardless of bluetooth state (on or off) my Wifi issue remains.

Besides the new Mac Airs and I assume the Pros are not running PCI wireless cards. So it seems that the problem exists on older Macs using Broadcom PCI cards and on the new Airs and Pros When did Mac quit using Broadcom cards?

According to MacFixit.com the new MacBook Air's still use the Broadcom card.

MacFixit teardown says...

At the heart of the card we find a BroadcomBCM4360, which enables operation on the 5 GHz band at speeds up to 1.3 Gbps and communication via Bluetooth 4.0.

Note that it also supports the 2.5 Ghz band

Also, note that I never had problems with my MacBook Pro 2011 (which I sold when I got my MacBook Air 2013)

The MacBook Pro 2011 also used a Broadcom card but it was a Broadcom BCM4331

The description for that board was...

802.11n wireless connectivity provided by a Broadcom BCM4331 "Single-Chip 802.11n Dual-Band 3x3 Wireless Solution." Bluetooth 3.0 support is handled by a BCM2070 in a separate, shielded section of the board.

That Broadcom BCM4331 board had three antenna connections for Wifi and one for Bluetooth.

But the new MacBook Air 2013 that I have problems with only has one antenna connector for Wifi and one for Bluetooth.

It uses the Broadcom BCM4360

That was my mistake. I was looking in the wrong place for the wireless card status.

I'm not supprised the dongle with external antenna produces a better reception than the internal antenna. Intresting question is: does it resolve the connectivity issue on your Macbook air aswell? (if there were any, can't make that out from your initial post)

Furthermore snow leopard did not have the connectivity issue so no comparriasant there either

I am sorry. I tried to make it clear in my last post too quote myself     "I am suggesting this as a possiblity. My Mac Air Mavs OS X is fixed (although it does occasionally hangs for 2 seconds on the dreaded ! once in a while).  I might be wrong about using this wireless dongle because  I do not have a mal-funtioning Mavs to try it on".

So I'll try clear up any ambiguity. My wake up problems with the Mac Air 2013 were solved a couple of months ago. But I was updating this old Macbook and the thought occured to me that maybe this was worth a try for those still plagued with the Wifi wake up issue. After all this dongle works quite well with the Wifi off. It is a green product and has low energy consumption and incrediable range.They have a single and dual band AC adapter. I was just throwing that out there as a temp. fix hopefully until Apple gets everbody else fixed. Becuase my 2013 Air hangs  occasionally (granted only for a couple of seconds) I still am wary that it might decide to go over to the dark side again. 

The tech support from Edimax was fantastic. They spent time with me about questions and said call back at any time if I had any further isssues. I called them because I was checking to see if the unistaller worked and it did not at first but then we got it to work correctly. You never know when you need to unistall something. 

No237,

You have a MacBook Pro (but I don't know if you ever said what year it is).

I have a 2013 MacBook Air 13"

When you turn bluetooth off, it definitely fixes the sleep / wake wireless problem.

(although I agree that is not a good solution)

richlove wrote:

 

No237,

 

You have a MacBook Pro (but I don't know if you ever said what year it is).

 

I have a 2013 MacBook Air 13"

When you turn bluetooth off, it definitely fixes the sleep / wake wireless problem.

(although I agree that is not a good solution)

Rich,

Mine is a "13-inch, Mid 2012" according to "About This Mac" dialog.

As I mentioned before, bluetooth on or off does not help the issue I experience. I don't use any bluetooth devices so it is always off anyway.

The only workaround for me right now is the ping-workaround, in the form of the wififixer.sh script I posted in this thread, which, I was glad to read, has helped at least one other person who posted recently in this thread.

Cheers

Well it appears i have cheerd to early....

Yesterday i got the disconnect issue right back in my face!

Funny enough it worked fine in the weekend after setting my wifi router to sugested configuration but after i had logged in to my work network (a windows based network) at work and came back home and logged on there the problem was back.

I think there is a connection cause all worked well after i deleted all the other networks in the network prefpane.

By now however i'm so fed up with this unadressed issue that i simply solved it by installing Firefox! all works well, no disconnect issues, direct reconnect after sleep so no probs.

Meaning two things: the issue is primarily Safari based And Apple is lacking to adress it propperly.

The problem is not primarily Safari-based. There are a broad swath of problems, and if installing Firefox has worked for you, that's great, but many people have the same problems with Firefox, Chrome, etc. Or have problems with or without bluetooth turned off. This is a serious engineering problem at Apple, and they don't seem to have any clue what to do about it.