Poor Wi-fi on Macbook Pro Retina 13 Late 2013

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Poor Wi-fi on Macbook Pro Retina 13 Late 2013

Hi everyone,

I have a new Macbook pro retina 13 Late 2013 (the 8GB ram/256GB) and i'm experiencing poor wifi connectivity. I noticed that the Wi-fi signal received is lower than on my other devices, and sometimes internet hangs while my older laptop or smartphone work ok. This happens when i'm rather far from the router. I have a 802.11g router at 2,4GHz, set on channel 11, and while, both laptops on the same spot, a 2009 Dell Studio 15 with an intel Wi-fi 5100 receives 99% signal from a 802.11n repeater in the living room and 52% signal from the 802.11g router, my macbook receives only 83% signal from the repeater and 32% from the 802.11g router. The decrease in wifi speed is a lot more noticeable when my macbook is sitting on a table rather than held on my hand away from a table. When i'm close to the router i don't have any problems with speed and either far or close to the router the ping tests don't show any package loss. When the macbook shows internet issues the RSSI is at about -70dB.

Can anybody help me? Is anybody experiencing this kinda bad antenna issue?

Thanks.

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Mavericks (10.9.1)

Posted on Jan 4, 2014 8:53 AM

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Answer 1

Premas

Level 1

5 points

Jan 28, 2014 11:44 PM in response to josfm

Hi Josfm,

I have exactly the same issue.. MBP 13" Retina circa June 2013.

Wifi signal will intermittantly drop, especially at range. If I compare the signal to my 5 year old Windows laptop, the Mac is defintaley recieving a weaker signal than the PC.

I've been scouring the 'net for a solution since i bought the machine, and sorry to say nothing works. A lot of people on here and other forums have said they've taken the MBP back to their nearest Apple Store who always blame the persons router, so looks like denial of a problem by Apple, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Switching wi-fi off and on again seems to provide the only fix, albeit short term.

Andy

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Answer 2

Feb 4, 2014 9:15 PM in response to Premas

Same problem here on my late 2013 13" Retina MBP. Low wifi signal and frequent long delays loading web pages. Using terminal to ping my router, ping times in the hundreds of msec are common, with lots of dropped packets. If I go to the iMac in the same room, times are usually in the single digits and no dropped packets. I took it to the Apple store, the guy surfed the web for a couple minutes and said it was fine. He did offer to have more extensive tests done if I left the machine there. I think I will.

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