Bluetooth interferes with WiFi in Yosemite 10.10 (reproducible)
There is a long (40 pages so far) thread about WiFi issues with Yosemite. However, I believe it has become a catchall thread for all kinds of connectivity problems and a growing number of "solutions" address only a few of them.
So I wanted to start a separate thread about a very specific issue I found to be easily reproducible: turning on Bluetooth in Yosemite 10.10 interferes with WiFi, lowering the bandwidth in a measurable way. I have tested this on two different MacBook Pro Retina (mid-2011 and late-2013) and an Apple Airport router.
To test is yourself do the following:
- Move away from the WiFi access point so the signal is not at full strength
- Turn Bluetooth Off
- Visit speedtest.net and run a speed test a handful of times (average the results discarding the outliers, i.e. the fastest and the slowest)
- Turn Bluetooth On
- Repeat Step 2 and compare results
In my case I see a 30% drop in download speed and about a 50% drop in upload speed. I'm not a hardware/radio engineer but I think it's pretty clear that the WiFi and Bluetooth drivers for the initial release version of Yosemite are causing some kind of interference. This is obviously wrong. Unless there is a programmable parameter that can be tweaked for these drivers, I doubt there is anything we can do about it until Apple releases an update with 10.10.1.
Turning off Bluetooth is an obvious fix for the WiFi issues but it is clearly not useful if you depend on Bluetooth accessories and defeats the purpose of may cool Yosemite features like Handoff.
Is anybody else seeing this in their environment?
