OSX Yosemite Wifi issues

jrpinna wrote:

Hi same issue here, closed to the router it is ok. Otherwise, wifi symbol shows full bars but the browsing experience is awful. Have to disable/enable wifi permanently. My mbp is nearly useless. I guess that if I go to an Apple store the wifi will working fine. I wonder if there is a way to record wifi status in order to come with some kind of evidence ?

Hi jrpinna,

Yes, this seems to have been my real issue from the very beginning, literally since the second I restarted my MBP after installing 10.10.0.

After my complaints on this thread, I received a couple of phone calls from Apple, we successfully recreated the issue, and then I emailed them the logs when I could get online again, but I have no idea whether it revealed anything more useful than an "inadequate wifi signal" (which had never been inadequate on the same laptop, in the same house, on Mavericks.) In my old place, where I couldn't really get VERY close to the router, there was one corner of my bed where my MBP had to face a certain direction for me to be able to get online - and, all the while, my wifi symbol was showing full bars. In my new place, where the router if like a foot away from me all the time, it's fine. But, if I take my MBP to the bedroom, which is maybe 15 feet away, it's a hit and miss. Again, full bars all the time.

I am a very average user, and I really don't understand how it all works. All I know is that these issues started the second I downgraded to Yosemite. There were literally no changes in the environment or the hardware.

Hi. I didn't see the message you quoted but here is your likely approach to gathering evidence. Hold OPTION when you click on the Wi-Fi icon in the menu-bar. that will reveal an expanded menu with more advanced settings. You can turn on logging and you can run an actual monitoring session that will save out a file that you can investigate or mail to Apple.

Hello Apple (yosemacbook) family,

we all know and experienced how bad could be a whole year without working bluetooth and wifi together. Actually after trying over 20 fixes from all around the globe internet sources, I found very strange and simple how to manage this problem. Btw all those fixes were temporary, ye wifi was working for around half an hour but than hangover came back.

My solution for working wifi with bluetooth is quite simple:

You need to setup your router right way, after many and many test of various routers and different places to log into with my bluetooth accessories I figured out, that all the wifi connection which were "public" in the street etc without any protection or password WORKED PERFECTLY, while any WPA2 secured wifi was a garbage together with bluetooth.

So how I solved this? I reset my router to a factory settings, so I would start with fresh router, setup a new name (ssid) to my router, told my macbook (rmbp 15 late13) to remember that router. Security/privacy let to stay "unprotected" (many of you can say aaaa thats strange i won't do that, but follow the reading) and told the router to "don't stream SSID name" so others can't find that router to join. While some advanced users still can manage join to hidden router, I gave them a ban for joining, due to setting up an advanced MAC address protection, so only my macbook, my smartphone, friends notebooks etc which was joined to the router before the reseting could join back and get online. (that's inside every router settings to allow connection of specific mac dresses only)

And bluetooth vs wifi solved for me and 3 of my friends.

Ofc I did a clean install of yosemite twice, but for you who are not able to spend over 8hours of setting all the programs and apps required for work like I did, I won't recommend you to reinstall whole your OS, just reinstall/setup the router the right way.

Give it a shot, because I would bet one of those hours I spent figuring what could be wrong, that this could help you. Maybe first try another router to reset into "unprotected" wifi or go your local café/square for joining into public wifi and testing if it works, than setup your router at home/work 😉

All the best,

Tomas

PS: Got an old TP-Link router with 2,4 only, haven't tested 5GHz routers... I know it looks like a hard way how to setup all your gear at home with their MAC address but take care of data you sent to internet and don't allow anyone else to join your network 🙂

tomaszboril wrote:

My solution for working wifi with bluetooth is quite simple:

I reset my router to a factory settings, so I would start with fresh router, setup a new name (ssid) to my router, told my macbook (rmbp 15 late13) to remember that router. Security/privacy let to stay "unprotected" (many of you can say aaaa thats strange i won't do that, but follow the reading) and told the router to "don't stream SSID name" so others can't find that router to join. While some advanced users still can manage join to hidden router, I gave them a ban for joining, due to setting up an advanced MAC address protection, so only my macbook, my smartphone, friends notebooks etc which was joined to the router before the reseting could join back and get online. (that's inside every router settings to allow connection of specific mac dresses only)

And bluetooth vs wifi solved for me and 3 of my friends.

It is actually quite easy for someone to scan through the network traffic to/from your router and (a) they will see the SSID in the stream, even when it is not broadcast, and (b) they will see the MAC addresses of devices in the vicinity as well. This is actually pretty easy to do with utilities one can easily download from various online sources. These utilities are typically used for troubleshooting, looking for interfering signals, etc., but along the way, these text strings can be seen.

So without a good WPA2 password protection on the router, almost anyone can do this and thus enter your "private network" and do who knows what to your devices, computers, phones, etc. I don't think this is an acceptable risk, at least not for me.

You guys are definively right but for someone it can be acceptable fix - no collegues, nor anyone who would join the network and hack yourself :-)

At least for me at work where I need to work on graphics fast which is not possible without bluetooth (still not working with any secret info so thats why I did it this way).

And I think it should be mentioned as a working fix here :-) quite strange one, but apple can focus on errors with wpa bugs and nonwpa working bluetooth.

Update from me. My dongle has just started showing signs of the Wi-Fi issue. Just the last couple of days. Which is really bad because I'm going into an extremely busy stage of a project for a client. Down-time will not reflect well on me. Will definitely have to warn them Apple's software and hardware is buggy and will let me down. Still waiting for the replacement Wi-FI card to arrive.

- Addition -

Seems to be related to waking from sleep and or unlocking the display.

Hello!

Been out of pocket but with just time enough to see your update. Sorry to hear about your dongle and more so about your client situation. This puts you in quite a bind.

I have taken full advantage of Boot Camp. I use Windows 7 Pro. I have found in Boot Camp, that splitting the partition is good for OS X as well as Windows. Have you considered Boot Camp?

I, speaking for myself, printed out the Boot Camp instructions from Apple and followed them to the letter. All you need is a dedicated 16 GB Thumbdrive formatted with MBR in MS DOS (for the Apple drivers) and, of course, the Windows 7 Pro Operating System Disc with Product Key. Just a suggestion. This may help you out of a tight with clients. Cheers!! -John

Awesome. I should have thought you would have a back up plan. Yeah, rebooting back and fourth is disruptive. One positive of Boot Camp, for me, is OS X can read NTFS and Windows reads HFS. Right now, until things get ironed out and more stable, I'm leaning more on my Windows install. Take care. Cheers!!

Glad that installing latest firmware on your wi-fi router worked and doing the factor reset.

Apple removed by post (I believe it was too promotional). However, it does have a long list of possible fixes. If anyone needs to see it, just search for "HighTechDad Yosemite Wi-Fi issues" or something similar and it should be one of the top results.

I'm really hoping to find a commonality somewhere. Perhaps it is Netgear routers, or perhaps it is simply reseting a wi-fi router to factory defaults.

There is a solution out there...

PLEASE HELP

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.discoveryd.plist

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.discoveryd.plist

NOT WORKING ANYMORE AFTER 10.10.4 UPGRADE

WIFI BACK TO 1 to 10 Mbps when I reached 200 before...

I've found the trick again 😀

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist

Works like a charm now, WiFi on Macbook is back to 200/300 Mbps!

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/01/why-dns-in-os-x-10-10-is-broken-and-what-yo u-can-do-to-fix-it/

Well, have updated to Yosemite 10.10.4 and wi-fi is still dropping out. My Macbook Air is so unreliable it's untrue! All other devices in the home work with no issues whatsoever and pre Yosemite the Macbook Air worked perfectly.

Any suggestions? Basically wi-fi drops out intermittently and the only way to resolve is to turn wifi on and then off again (on the Mac).

I finally managed to fix my issues a couple of days ago. Rather than the completely unable to connect/random disconnection/bluetooth issues which seem to be the majority around here, my issue was specific and recreatable - to do with no wifi connectivity when opening the lid for 30 seconds to 1 minute.

I have a British Telecom (BT) Home Hub 4 router. After first upgrade to Yosemite, my rMBP (mid 2012) when opening the lid to come out of 'sleep', would then take 30 seconds to 1 minute to reconnect to my wifi. Sometimes it would then lose connection again after a further 10/15 seconds. Sometimes it wouldn't connect at all. In either of those cases, turning the rMBP wifi connection off and on in the top menu would then establish a working connection after a further 30 secs to 1 minute. After that, the wifi connection would work perfectly until the lid was closed, then rinse and repeat.

I had previously tried the removal of all of the 'cloud' based access points and re-connected, but I am unsure if this had truly happened or if another device had remembered some of the settings. Either way it didn't fix the behaviour. Finally, after months of checking this thread I tried a different approach and found this post on the BT support site: https://community.bt.com/t5/Other-Broadband-Discussions/Macs-drop-off-and-won-t- connect-to-BTHub-Macs-and-BT-Broadband/m-p/1444319/highlight/true#M102321 (in particular the 7th post by Chrissmith92).

They suggest splitting the router's automatic setting for frequency and separating the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. I did as suggested so that I now have 2 available SSIDs - the new 5GHz one I have named with a 5 on the end. First tests against the original SSID (which I did not rename) were good - my rMBP was no longer exhibiting the old drop out behaviour after opening the lid. I then tried my rMBP against the new 5GHz SSID (expecting the old behaviour to return), yet this now worked too, and has now been working solidly for 2 days.

Due to the number of varying problems around this area this is obviously no silver bullet. With to the number of moving parts (O/S updates, router firmware auto-updates, new hand off functionality, new stack, cloud SSIDs), I'm still not sure where the real fault is, but this may hopefully help some of you, or give more clues to dig deeper.

In summary:

My issue: No wifi connection for up to a minute when opening lid

My machine: Retina Macbook Pro Mid 2012

My O/S: Yosemite 10.10.4 (14E26a)

My Router: BT Home Hub 4 (firmware 4.7.5.1.83.8.130.1.26 (Type A))

The fix: Router -> Advanced settings -> Enter the admin password from the card on your router -> Continue -> Wireless -> 5GHz -> Sync with 2.4GHz: No -> SSID: add a 5 at the end so you can tell the difference -> Hit apply -> Connect to original SSID on Macbook -> Connect to new 5GHz SSID on Macbook -> De-stress the last 6 months and have a beer.

Cheers

IN SUMMARY

10.10.3: this trick below would work until you restart your computer:

1. open Terminal

2. type: sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.discoveryd.plist

3. enter your password and enter

4. type: sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.discoveryd.plist

Now that this lame 10.10.4 release is out: this trick below works BUT ONLY until you open your lid again or restart your compuer:

1. open Terminal

2. type: sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist

3. enter your password and enter

4. type: sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist

Does anyone know how to run a script automatically whenever I open my lid, that would WiFi with the latest trick (unload and load mDNSResponder)?

Otherwise I'm back to 10 Mbps all the time. It is so annoying.

Thank you.

No Change. Worse if anything. But I wouldn't expect change since the public version is likely going to be a rebadged version of the last beta. Labeled as "no known issues" HA laugh at that every-time.... My replacement Wi-FI module arrived yesterday. unfortunately I have to wait until my current deadline is up. I think the dongle issue I was having is just a sleep issue with the USB port, so otherwise seems to behave normal. Easy to get upset about network issues these days.