Airport Extreme losing 5GHz internet connection

For what it's worth, my problems with it also appeared the same day I bought it. After fighting with it for a few days, I just reset it.

Ludicrously disappointed, as Apple has always provided high quality items in the past.

AAgreed. My problem is that I loose internet connection all together. When I look at the Airport uti it shows that the AirPort Extreme along withe Airport Expressare both okay but with no internet connection. I too can ping within the network to all devices but have no outside connection unless I reset it. Freaking nuts.

I seem to be having the same issues, but I also have my iMac connected to the Airport Extreme with a cat 6 cable and it too loses internet connection. It's like if the connection is idle too long, it just stops completely (I haven't noticed it dropping while I was using it) and the only way to get the ethernet and wifi working again is to unplug the Airport and plug it back and it works immediately.

So basically every morning and evening I have to turn it off/on.

I'm considering getting a small power strip so I can just flick the switch instead of pulling the plug out of the device.

I wish there was something else to do. I will call AppleCare again (last time they had me reset both the modem and the router at the same time and somehow convinced me that it was the modem that was the problem). Now I have an awesome, super fast modem, but dropped connections 😝 It's clear now that it's not the cable company or the modem, it's the router( I can plug the ethernet in directly from the modem and it immediately works).

sorry for rambling, I'm just so happy to find I'm not the only one with issues like this!

I am using using the 6th Gen Airport Extreme since two years without any problems. Due to a lightning strike which fried my Cisco cable modem, my internal network setup changed.

The Cisco cable modem only device got replaced by a Technicolor 7200 cable modem with an integrated routing functionality that can NOT be deactivated due to a wise business decision made by my cable provider Unitymedia here in Germany.

So I had to put the Airport Extreme into bridge mode to avoid a double NAT setup, rewire it, so that one of the switch ports connect to the cable modems RJ45 output, reconfigure the IP ranges etc. So far so good...

Then i noticed the same strange behavior like you.

5Ghz connection to the internet drops completely, no ICMP echo request over the 5GHz hits the internet, everything in my local subnet is completely reachable.

As soon as I connect to the Airport Extreme via the Airport Utility, the ICMP echo requests went through giving a reply from the target, in this case Googles DNS via 8.8.8.8

This behavior is reproducible in my case.

Since I have never investigated the debugging features of the Airport Extreme I might miss something, but they are extremely limited, aren't they?

Is there a way to ramp up the log verbosity and output it to something like a Syslog server?

For the record:

• Airport Extreme 6th Gen
• Firmware 7.7.7
• Two different SSIDs for 2.4 and 5 GHz

Best wishes from Germany,

hammingdistance

Is there a way to ramp up the log verbosity and output it to something like a Syslog server?

For the record:

• Airport Extreme 6th Gen
• Firmware 7.7.7
• Two different SSIDs for 2.4 and 5 GHz

Sorry, but not with the new & "improved" version 6.x of the AirPort Utility. However, if you still have a pre-Mountain Lion Mac or a PC running Windows XP, 7, 8, 8.1, or 10, with v5.x of this utility, you can capture log output to a Syslog server.

Hi Tesserax,

unfortunately I have not been able to activate the output to the Syslog server by using the old Windows version of the Airport Utility. I assume that the Airport Extreme 6th Gen uses the standards like port 514 and UDP for Syslog. Furthermore I was not able to set the channel of my 5GHz network, it defaulted to "automatic" channel configuration so I think the tool just does not work correctly with the new Airport Extreme.

Have you been able to activate the Syslog output by using the old Windows version of the Airport Utility on a new 6th Gen Airport Extreme?

Cheers,
hammingdistance

.....so I think the tool just does not work correctly with the new Airport Extreme.

This is correct. Most of the problem that you are having is that the Windows 5.x version of AirPort Utility (and the Apple 5.x version as well) are not officially supported with the current AirPort Extreme and AirPort Time Capsule models, so while some features and settings might work, there are some that do not.

Logging does not appear to work at all with the current AirPort versions when I've tried this in the past with a 5.x version of AirPort Utility.. Not sure about the Syslog, but it my understanding that the current AirPorts do not support SNMP, which would normally be used to generate data for logging information.

To confirm, please see the System Requirements for the current AirPort Extreme 802.11ac (which is sometimes known as a 6th Gen version with some users).....and.....the current AirPort Time Capsule 802.11ac (which some users call a 5th Gen version). Apple apparently stopped using the Generation naming when the "ac" models were introduced about 3 years ago.

Reference......http://www.apple.com/airport-extreme/specs/