Q: OSX Yosemite Wifi issues

Can you let us know how long ago you made these changes please? I don't want to upset you but I and many others have posted too many "Hurrahs!" here only to come back 2/4/12/24 hours later to report the return of the monster....

I just did a combo Update install and everything seems to work Fine now. But how Long?

I think I may have found a solution in my case but it may not apply to most people. Fortunately, I had a couple friends come over this morning who are much more knowledgeable about Wifi networks, especially with Apple airports.

Here's the important detail. I have what I would call a heterogeneous-homogenous wifi network. It's all Apple devices but they are different vintages and versions. However, what turned out to be the key was that my airports were configured with a mix of "WPA2 Personal" and "WPA/WPA2 Personal". Turns out that when I was trying to roam from one basestation to another where the "Wireless security" setting was not the same, my laptop could not make the switch.

I had no idea that "WPA/WPA2 Personal" was not a superset of "WPA2 Personal". Basically, whichever set of credentials my laptop had dictated which airport worked. I also think this may have been why I kept seeing the request for permission to access my Keychain for this wireless network from Network Diagnostics, since the credentials kept changing. As we were chatting before my friends left, they wondered aloud if my keychain syncing via iCloud could be a factor in when this problem arose. I don't know. I needed to get back to work so I didn't offer to test it.

So, after a few hours the network seems stable. I will continue to monitor and report back if I see anything.

Chip

FYI, Below is a message I started to post last week but got delayed.

Before I start, I'd like to give a hat tip to Wifi Explorer. I'm not sure who on this forum posted it but it's been helpful to me.

I was looking at my problem some more and while the most recent failure was not a WiFi drop, it definitely seems to be triggered by a change in WiFi signal level by moving locations within the house.

The first thing I noticed was email images stopped loading; so I launched Network diagnostics which showed that the "ISP" had failed:

So I launched Wifi Explorer and all my Wifi signals were still active and I was still attached to the same airport at the same signal strength (2.4Ghz) as I was before I moved:

So I looked at my TCP settings and it looked OK:

I tried to Renew the lease and ended up getting a self-assigned IP address (169.254.64.58).

I then moved back to where I was and everything resolved itself.

Personally I say save your money. I have replaced two routers since Yosemite. At first I thought it was where the issue was coming from. I don't have the info handy on what my NetGear router was but was replaced with D-Link Dir-868L http://us.dlink.com/products/connect/wireless-ac1750-dual-band-gigabit-cloud-rou ter-2/

I still have all the same issues. You will see a faster speed but for me if it didn't last long. On average I am still restarting my computer anywhere from 10-15 times a day. Last night I needed to download a 2.75GB file. 5 times network connection was lost. I had to have the file broken into two as was the only way to get the download completed. Mind you I had to restart the computer in between both parts.

At this point we know it is an issue with Yosemite. Apple has been able to reproduce it on their end. I have no clue why none of this has been addressed here from anyone at Apple but I have been back and forth with them online and on the phone regarding this.

Sad to say as of today I am using a old borrowed Lenovo desktop on the same wifi as my iMac and speeds have been close to 60.00Mbs Download and 30.00Mbs Upload and have not lost connection once.

So for the time being I have an expensive iMac sculpture sitting on my desk that will get dusted with the other bric brac.

At this point we know it is an issue with Yosemite. Apple has been able to reproduce it on their end.

Could you tell us a bit more?  Like who, when?  Exciting!

Hi I hope I'm replying to the correct thread. This is truly frightening. I moved into the world of apple to avoid exactly this situation. I'm not techwise therefor apple was the solution to my problems - great for three years, now after purchasing my top end iMac (shipped with yoshiteme) I'm back in the world of WINDOWS! it sounds like everyone is actually enjoying this problem. I'm not.

I AM A USER NOT A TECHNICIAN!!!

"it sounds like everyone is actually enjoying this problem. I'm not."

qvsgv

Please point out the posts where "everyone" is enjoying this?

Hi Huss417

That was sarcasm! I'm new to these threads and it seems all of you seem to be happy to try and find solutions/workarounds. I'm not skilled enough in this area to even begin to attempt to find a solution. Anyway, it's missing the point. This should be apple's problem to solve not ours. Is this the bad apple that spoils the barrel?

Huss417, you have multiple routers advertising the same SSID? Are you sure they are both configured exactly the same way? Just having "Wireless security" configured differently ("WPA2 Personal" vs. "WPA/WPA2 Personal") between two routers caused advertising the same SSID seems to have caused my problem. It seems to have caused a problem with keychain which meant if I had the credential for SSID+"WPA2 Personal" I could not connect to SSID+"WPA/WPA2 Personal" or vice-versa.

Once I made sure everyone had exactly the same setting, "WPA2 Personal," my problems seemed to go away.

Still faultless here.

Can anyone still having trouble try their wifi while their modem is physically touching their mac? Butt them up against one another.

qvsgv, I would be hard pressed to believe that Apple isn't a) aware and b) working on a solution. This thread is just too active, for one. When one takes into consideration all the factors that come into play like number of base stations, different manufacturers, different configurations, number of computers connected to a network, computer manufacturers, operating systems on those computers, devices connect to those computers (e.g. via bluetooth), the permutations can be overwhelming. It can be a challenge just to keep the same chips in the same "model" of a laptop because of changes at a chip manufacturer.

I was shocked when I stopped and took an inventory of all the devices we have on our wifi network at home. It's like a small enterprise today but we have no IT department.

Anyway, I have a friend who has managed online communities for other big companies and they definitely pay attention to those communities. They invest a lot of staff time and resources into building and maintain, so why ignore them?

chip.r  - that's why we have standards. All devices are designed to conform with standards such as 802.11g etc. There should be no need to test every device sold on the market, unless perhaps if Apple are not adhering to the same standards and being naughty, misusing wifi and bluetooth for purposes they were not intended for.

Things seem to be fixed with the latest seed. Problem is, my wireless drops are actually too sporadic and infrequent to ever know for sure. I might go for days or weeks with solid WiFi, then have the issue suddenly reappear. This has been the case throughout the seed program while running the various Yosemite iterations, though it seems to be steadily improving.

As an aside, throughput has never been an issue for me, I don't use bluetooth (never have) and so it's turned off, I connect only at 2.4 Ghz, and my MacBook Pro is too old for AWDL0. In the past, I had pretty good success deleting and recreating the wireless service. Changing the wireless channel to static on the router may have helped as well, but who knows?

Guardedly optimistic, guess you could say.

15" MacBook Pro 6,2 (Mid-2010)

OS X 10.10.3 (14D72i)

Broadcom BCM43xx 1.0 (5.106.98.100.24)

Last Yosemite Update fixed it for me. Whew. Sorry to hear others are still having issues. Hopefully Apple is monitoring this thread.

I'd put standards and "certification" a bit differently (working in this industry on the industrial end).

The standard is the absolute minimum framework that must be supported by an implementation (for example 802.11 b/g/n network capability) to be certified (in this case Wi-Fi certified). Sometimes there are also "draft" versions (like the 802.11n standard that was only finalised years after the draft devices were commercially available) and also "wave" versions (like the wave 1 for 802.11ac, and wave 2 coming up in the near future).

With an example:

the standard gas-compression based non-commercial fridge must be able to maintain a certain temperature over a certain heat load. It has to adhere to certain safety definitions (electrical, mechanical, environmental), but basically that's it.

It does not define the size, the volume, the colour, the shape, whether it has an LCD or being "smart" and the list could just go on and on.

What the manufacturer puts on top of that it is the manufacturer's sole responsibility.

So in this case nobody else has AWDL and I'm not even sure if Bonjur is standardised by the IEEE, those are patents, but not standards.

Another thing is that certification ensures that the device meets the standard by itself (so it's only the wi-fi HW essentially with the firmware that is certified, but not how it's put into a laptop/desktop/etc...).

I don't want to sound like or be a smartss. What I'm trying here is to explain that for the "end-user" (that is us) it is the final "implementation" that matters and not the "standard"...

In this case the "standard" is met, it's the "implementation" that's botched, which is the responsibility of the "solution provider" (that is Apple).

(Note: Wireless support is really trying to sort this out. I'm requested for different test and providing data almost every single day.)