MacBook Pro and WiFi Problems

Having exactly the same problem with my G5 Imac. My wife's G4
notebook can sit next to me, happily playing away on the internet and
I get not signal from the Belken router, twelve feel away. Have done
every home-style cure I can get my hands on. No problem with the
Airport card, according to checks.

Def not the easy, sit down and get some work done kinda days anymore.

Kraye.

have you tried changing the channel you use? Usually set to Auto by default, but can run into all kinds of interference from cordless phones and such according to the last tech support I called re: my wireless router. Had similar problems, he had me switch from Auto to channel 11 and problem disappeared.

Good luck!

On 7-Nov-2008, at 02:59, daniel badeaux wrote:
> have you tried changing the channel you use? Usually set to Auto by
> default, but can run into all kinds of interference from cordless
> phones and such according to the last tech support I called re: my
> wireless router. Had similar problems, he had me switch from Auto to
> channel 11 and problem disappeared.

I have a similar, but slightly different problem. First off, I have
no cordless phones. Or phones, for that matter. I have wired
ethernet everywhere and then I use the airport on my MacPro to create
a shared connection for the laptop. I do this rather than use a
separate wireless router because I want the laptop to be able to
access the MacPro's shared printers, drives, and such.

It all seems to work, sorta. What I notice is that the connections
seems to 'pulse'. It will go from full bars to no connection and
back, and even at full connection, it is noticeably slower than I
think even 802.11b, and the iBook g4 has 802.11g IIRC.

Now that I have my iTouch, I really notice it. If I am upstairs I
sometimes have a solid connection, and other times no connection at
all. If I am very close (less than 15 feet away) the connection stays
up, but it is always excessively slow.

The MTU is at 1500, and I don't see a way to tell the airport to be g
and n only (or g only, would be fine, the MacPro is the only n device
I own).

I also experienced that my MacBook Pro suddenly got a bad or nonexisting connection to my old AirPort Express (802.11g only). It only showed 1 or 2 bars in signal strength. This could happen after 5-10 days when the wifi connection working perfectly.

After changing channels (2 or 3 times) I haven't experienced that problem for maybe three or four months now.

I will try to describe in more detail what happened when I still had the problem because it was somewhat weird.

It was only the MacBook Pro that lost connectivity with the AirPort Express. At the same time I had three other devices, a PowerBook G4, an Apple TV and an old AirPort Basestation (via WDS), all communicating with the Airport Express with perfect signal strength.

When I experienced the problem I also used to start iStumbler on the MacBook Pro to get data for available networks. And iStumbler shows perfect 'signal strength' and 'noise' values for my network on the MacBook Pro that at the same time shows poor signal strength in the menu bar. I really don't understand this.

Well problem has gone now after changing channels (after suggestion from Apple Support).

Hope it works out for you too.

Please provide link(s) to relevant tech support article(s).

E.g. how to "change channels".

Thank you!

On 06Nov2008, at 04:47, Kraye Grymonnt wrote:

> Having exactly the same problem with my G5 Imac. My wife's G4
> notebook can sit next to me, happily playing away on the internet and
> I get not signal from the Belken router, twelve feel away. Have done
> every home-style cure I can get my hands on. No problem with the
> Airport card, according to checks.

Interesting. Let's assume, for the moment, that defective hardware or
software isn't to blame.

The G5 iMac has *far* better sensitivity that the aluminum or titanium
G4 laptops. Is it possible that another nearby WiFi machine is
interfering with your network? The laptop, due to its lower
sensitivity, might not be sensitive to the interference, while the
iMac is.

Have you tried manually assigning channels in your base station? Try
forcing the base station to use channel 1, then 6, then 11 (other
channels all overlap, so these three should be sufficient for a test).
See if the problem goes away.

--Ron

On Nov 11, 2008, at 11:54 PM, Ron Risley wrote:

> The G5 iMac has *far* better sensitivity that the aluminum or titanium
> G4 laptops. Is it possible that another nearby WiFi machine is
> interfering with your network? The laptop, due to its lower
> sensitivity, might not be sensitive to the interference, while the
> iMac is.
>
> Have you tried manually assigning channels in your base station? Try
> forcing the base station to use channel 1, then 6, then 11 (other
> channels all overlap, so these three should be sufficient for a test).
> See if the problem goes away.

I have done this, both at my client's client's house and at my own.
It doesn't solve the problem. (nor has it solved the problem for the
many, many others who clog various forums asking for help on this).

One thing that DOES seem to help is to disable encryption on the
network. Which, of course, is no solution at all.

Scott Wyant

I've had the same problem. My wife's iBook gets much better WIFI
connectivity than I do with my MacBook Pro. When I have only one or
two bars, she can come into the same room and get 4 or 5 bars.

The problem was much worse with my old powerbook. I understand that
the antenna location or size is improved on the latest models.

H.

On 11/13/08 4:52 PM, "Scott Wyant" <swyantgmail.com> wrote:

> One thing that DOES seem to help is to disable encryption on the
> network. Which, of course, is no solution at all.

I'm presently in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, head back to Italy on
the MacMania 8 Cruise and several people have reported this WiFi issue.

Disabling encryption on board the ship is also not possible. Several MacBook
Airs and newer MacBook/Pros will have intermittent issues with connectivity
while my older MacBook Pro hasn't had any at all.
--
Shawn King

I have found a free utility called AP Grapher to be quite useful in characterising what is happening. It shows a graph of various components of the signal and you can see clearly the ups and downs. As people suggest, two machines next to each other and a yard from the base station can show totally different graphs.

And of course none of this explains what is happening to make the signal so variable :-(

One thing to keep in mind - the "bars" in the Airport menu do NOT represent signal strength, but rather transfer bit rate. This has been the case since at least Tiger. I don't remember exactly, but the switch from signal strength was made by Apple several years ago (Panther?)

A 3rd party utility such as AP Grapher, iStumbler or AirRadar is needed if you want to know signal strength. Of course, one of the main factors affecting transmission rate is signal to noise, but mostly at the fringes of the base station coverage or in the setting of same channel interference.

K.

On Nov 16, 2008, at 12:41 AM, KMacMail wrote:

> One thing to keep in mind - the "bars" in the Airport menu do NOT
> represent signal strength, but rather transfer bit rate. This has
> been the case since at least Tiger. I don't remember exactly, but
> the switch from signal strength was made by Apple several years ago
> (Panther?)
>
> A 3rd party utility such as AP Grapher, iStumbler or AirRadar is
> needed if you want to know signal strength. Of course, one of the
> main factors affecting transmission rate is signal to noise, but
> mostly at the fringes of the base station coverage or in the setting
> of same channel interference.

Thanks, but it's not just the signal strength -- the signal itself
disappears, and webpages take longer and longer to load (over the
space of 5-10 min) until they simply don't load at all, and the
computer drops off the network entirely. (and iStumbler confirms this.)

As I mentioned, this is a wide-spread issue, known to Apple, and they
have yet to promulgate a fix. Most distressing.

Scott Wyant

I have one of the first MacBook Pro's to come out of China(March 2006). Recently, I could not even stay connected 10 feet from the airport. After months of working with AppleCare, the AppleStore, and replacing the Airport Extreme card, I finally had to ship my computer to Texas and have the antenna (which is located in the display) replaced. Problem fixed. I can now go to a room two stories away from my airport and stay connected.

BTW, If you hold down the option key and click on the wifi icon in the header it will show the channel, RSSI and transmission rate numerically.

T. Rike

Sunday, 2008 November 16

Greetings

It is kind of comforting that others have the same problem :)

In my case we were staying somewhere for a while. My wife's MacBook
readily detected a bunch of networks, one of them unprotected. The
MacBook Pro saw perhaps one or two only, different each time, and
never strong enough even to establish a log in. The MacBook however
reliably connected to the available network anywhere in the place.
The only way I could was to connect through the MacBook and use it as
the terminal. This worked very well, but if I hadn't had a MacBook
...

I wondered if there was a device to increase the WiFi sensitivity --
a USB plug in perhaps.

I wondered too what the specifications are for sensitivity for
receive and transmit levels. There must be some. No doubt it is an
Apple secret, as so much is.

zl

--

On 17-Nov-2008, at 04:01, Thomas Rike wrote:
> RSSI and transmission rate numerically.


Does anyone know what the RSSI and transmission Rate numbers mean?

-78 and 13 are mine, respectively; I have yet to check the numbers on
the laptop though.

Ran into this just the other week. Wireless network working great. One day, no connection. Long story short, wifi just wasn't working reliably. Same symptoms as the previous posts... connection fine, then slow page loads, then nothing. Have started cable modem and airport extreme about a thousand times. Each time starts with good connection then nothing.

Downloaded free wifi radar from xirrus - xirris.com/library/wifitools.php and discovered that out of the 30 or so wifi spots around me (zero property line neighborhood) no one was using channel 7. I switched from auto channel to manually select 7 and viola! I am writing this from my powerbook pro with my new wireless connection.

For my next trick, I am going to increase the speed setting on the airport to see if I can get faster loads.

Hope this helps!

On 11-Dec-2008, at 05:04, Greg Schlensker wrote:
> downloaded free wifi radar from xirrus - xirris.com/library/
> wifitools.php


That URL does not load and xirris.com comes up with 1) an invalid
certificate and 2) a Windows Outlook Web Access login screen.

I found a program called wifi-radar at <http://wifi-radar.systemimager.org/
 > but have no idea if that's the software you used or not; I doubt it
as it requires iwconfig to be installed...

There is AirGrab's Wifi-Radar <http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/29193/wifi-radar
 > which I guess is what you used?

At 4:49 AM -0800 12/12/08, LewisGmail wrote:
>On 11-Dec-2008, at 05:04, Greg Schlensker wrote:
>>downloaded free wifi radar from xirrus - xirris.com/library/
>>wifitools.php

Spelling matters. Comprehension matters.

>That URL does not load and xirris.com comes up with 1) an invalid
>certificate and 2) a Windows Outlook Web Access login screen.

OP went to <http://xirrus.com/library/wifitools.php> and presumably
downloaded a product named "Xirrus Wi-Fi Monitor," whose description
states, "A radar-like display graphically displays available Wi-Fi
networks and their range."
--
Regards,
Chuck