Q: Slow Wifi in Mavericks

I'm having the exact same problem on an early 2011 MBP.

I run into the problem when I switch networks. I use the mb in the office on cable and at home on cable.

Normally I never shutdown the MB, so I put it to sleep at work and reconnect to the network at home.

Since I have upgraded to mavericks, switching networks causes the network to become unworkable slow.

The only real solution is to reboot - very annoying.

I have 2x machines, MBA & 15" Retina MBP

Both are now nearly worthless on wifi from home network, corporate network or over mobile pass-through.

To be fair to the wifi, not sures wired is working as well as it used to either.

4 other macs, 3 playstations, 2x iPhones, 3x iTouch, 3x iPads in my house all working fine.  So I'm not messing with the network.  100% chance it's the drivers.

Seems like it was working pretty well when I first moved to Mavericks and only over the past couple of weeks have I had 30+ second delays over simple operations like sending an email.  However, I don't see any updates in the list during the past 30 days that appear to be touching these drivers.

Anyone tried something as daring as rolling back to pre-Mavericks wifi drivers?

I had a similar problem that was cured by changing the router wifi channel.  If you go to Apple symbol/About this Mac/More Info/System Report/WiFi you will get a list of all of the WiFi signals your Mac is seeing including the channel used by each of your "neighbors".  I changed the channel selection in my router from AUTOMATIC to MANUAL and then picked a channel not used by any neighbor on the list.  WiFi speed went from >1 Mbps to >50 Mbps on a Comcast internet hookup.  The router (a Technicolor TC8305) persistently picked the same channel used by my neighbors when the router was set to AUTOMATIC.  The Apple internet diagnostics identified "crowded channel" as an issue.

Hope this helps.

Very helpful! Everyone is channel one! How do I change the channel?

Look on your router or its documentation for the URL of the router.  You can communicate with the router just like you can communicate with a web site.  The URL should looke something like this - 10.0.0.5.  I think all routers can be communicated with by attaching an ethernet cable from your computer to the ethernet connecter on the router. Some routers can be communicated with wirelessly also.  Get out your router manual or go on line and download it.  The manual will have instructions for you on how to change the channel and a bunch of other stuff.  If you can't get the manual, try this:  Go to http://10.0.0.5 (for example).  You should get a sign in screen.  Unless you changed things when you set up the router originally, the default user name will be admin and the default pasword will be password. Maneuver your way through the menus until you find a page for channel selction.  Mine was hard to find but it turned up as a link in the troubleshooting setion of the menu tree under "Slow Internet Connection".  When you get there change channel selection from automatic to manual.  Then pick a channel that is not in use in your area and then back out of the set up program.

Couple of small points, 1.) Turning wifi off and on should cause automatic channel selection to change the wifi channel. The Mavericks issue may be that the router gets stuck on a particular channel and does not change.  2.) If you are defaulting to channel 1 you may have a 2.4 Mhz only router.  If you have a 5 Mhz router you may want to change to a high numbered channel (those are on 5 Mhz) to get more isolation from other routers.  If you have a dual band router you can set two channels - one for your 2.4 Mhz devices and one for your 5 Mhz.

Russ

I moved to 10.  No one on 10.  Did not fix a thing.

some additional information, people at work with later models (late 2012+) don't seem to have the problem. All people with earlier models - and that moved to Mavericks - do have the same problem.

The thing I don't understand is that the network seems to work at the office, but fails at home.

Although, local network at home does not seem to be affected (192.168.*) it's just the internet connection and it's just with my machine - my wife's late 2009 iMac on Mavericks is not affected, neither are all ipads/iphones.

When I have the problem at home, I can mitigate the problem by switching a lot between wifi and cable which solves the problem temporarily. The problem still appears both on wifi and on cable.

In the weekend, the problem continues through saturday, but disappears on sunday.

This just has to be something cache related.

I updated to 10.9.2 yesterday - hoping the issue would improve. Unfortunately it's gotten worse.

Now my workaround with switching between wifi/wired is not working anymore.

It's enourmously annoying to have a bad internet connection at home - whilst my wife next to me has no problems at all on iMac.

<Frustration mode> But apple is no more the no-compromise quality house I was used to. I could always update to the next osx version without doubt - knowing for sure that there will be no issues. But since changing to mavericks I'm experiencing serious issues (I call bad internet a serious issue) of windows like proportions. The new memory mgt ***** too - I'm running a java development environment with IntelliJ for IDE, apache cassandra, postgres and elasticsearch on a 16 GB machine so it's quite the demanding environment. The memory mgt worked flawless on 10.8 - but got quirky now on 10.9.

Now I have to reboot every week in order to get a fast laptop again.

What is this now? Do we also need to wait one year before switching os so that all the bugs are out?

At the office I'm voting for moving the techies back to linux in order to regain stability and predictability.

When do companies learn? Deadlines are less important than the quality feeling with your customer base.

It's ok to miss a deadline if that means delivering quality.

To me it now feels like apple is turning into a dell like company with a homegrown operating system with a quality level just above the average supplier.

</Frustration mode>

sorry for the rant.. It's just that I'm really annoyed about something I would never have expected to occur on an apple product... I've been using apple machines for work since 2005 and was very happy about it - but as things are now, my next work machine will run linux.

I'd like to thank everyone for there suggestions on this topic as it puzzled me all day when i installed Mavericks.  I too had extra slow internet until i logged into my router and changed the channel from Auto to a manual number i.e. 3

This sorted the speed instantly after checking the other local network channels as suggested by user Russ B (above).

Thanks and im speedy as normal now

Thank you everyone - Im running a late 2008 mbp, updated to Mavericks and noticed the slow internet speeds..I changed my router channel to manual - channel 6...speeds are back to normal  - thanks again !!

Similar problem for me; it took me a little while to see it as a consistent problem but it seems to have started with the Mavericks upgrade on my 2009 MacBook Pro.

Characteristic behaviour is very low data rate that gets progressively worse over a non-trivial transfer. Copying a 100MB non-compressable file from a server, it starts at about 250 KB/s (much less than the 3 - 3.5 MB/s typical for clients on this network) then drops fairly steadily to around 50KB/s by the end of the file.

I haven't found any changes that affect it much as yet; different APs, channels, etc. make only minor differences.

No similar problems on Ethernet; 100tx runs at about 10 - 10.5 MB/s as expected.

Update: I was running on fairly old Netgear a/b/g WAPs; one of those died and I replaced them with new Ubiquti a/b/g/n/ac APs. Much, much faster now, so obviously there's more than just the computer or software involved. However, I haven't seen the same slowness on other computers, so I'm reluctant to blame it all on the APs. Note that I'm now running in the default 802.11n mode at 144Mb/s; haven't yet had a chance to try forcing 802.11a mode at 54Mb/s to see how that works. But I'm betting on some combination of software / computer / AP here, and probably will never figure it out. BTW, I'm seeing pretty slow connections at the office using Cisco APs too, but that's a much less controlled environment and an 802.11g connection on 2.4GHz, so it's hard to have a clear expectation to compare to. I'm not seeing any clear pattern of the characteristic slowdown here.

I too experienced severe wifi performance issues after upgrading to Mavericks from Lion. This was especially noticeable while watching streamers on twitch.tv or viewing videos on youtube. Yet, I had no issues when I connected using Ethernet. I talked to AppleCare about it and they had me try a few things (clear browser cache - really?), viewing a video in iTunes and creating a new user and testing twitch and youtube. Wireless issues remained yet Ethernet was perfectly fine. The AppleCare rep said the next thing they would recommend is re-installing Mavericks (sigh) if I called back on the issue. I came across this thread today and checked my channel settings. They were set to automatic and was using channel 11. Using System Report, it showed there was another network using that channel too. So, I changed the channel settings to manual and picked a channel not currently in use by the other networks shown in the report. That seems to have fixed the problem for me (knock on wood). I'm back to watching twitch.tv streaming without video stutter on wireless.

I never had this problem with Lion. Did I just luck out with the channels in Lion or is there something Mavericks does dramatically different than Lion when dealing with multiple nearby networks using the same channel that causes the video stuttering issues?

Perfect! I've changed the channel and, by now, "That seems to have fixed the problem for me (knock on wood)"[2].

Thanks, Russ.B !!!!!!!!! Apple support should read your post.

This link helped me find where to go in order to change the channel: http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/23783/~/improving-your-wireless-co nnection-by-changing-channel-%282.4ghz%29.

So, after having tried every trick without more than temporary luck, I've finally stumbled upon a solution that has worked for four days now. Hope you guys can get the same good result.

Setup:

2013 Macbook Pro Retina - w/ Mavericks, obviously.

Asus router + Billion home plug / wifi extender.

Experience:

After sleep my Macbook would get speeds of 2-3 Mbit/s on my 50/50 Mbit connection. All other devices had no problems and got 30-40 Mbit wireless.

Messing with Bluetooth settings didn't work.

Turning wifi on and off didn't work.

Deleting and re-adding wifi SSID didn't work.

Renewing leases didn't work.

Changing channels didn't work.

And there's probably a few more things that I've tried - that didn't work.

But here's the thing. I noticed that if I switched to the wifi on the home plug extender (BiPac 2073N) my Macbook got full speed but if I connected to the wifi from my main Asus router, I was soon back to Slowville.

So that got me trying different settings in the router, and so - without further delays - here's the solution that has worked for me:

I noticed that the Asus creates two signals, a 2.4 GHz and a 5 GHz. They both use the same SSID. I now changed the SSID for the 5 GHz signal and made that the SSID on top of my prioritized list in preferences, so that's the one I connect to as default.

Since then - boom. Full speed ahead!

At the same time I've been upgraded and am now getting almost 200 Mbit/s - up AND down. Sweet!)

Hope it helps at least a few other frustrated Maverics wifi users.