Can anyone explain this...?

First of all, your thread title's not very descriptive of your question. Might want to edit your post (Hint: go advanced to change the thread title) and fix it.

I have noticed the same thing on my iMac in the basement. Never got good Wi-Fi reception with SL and before. Gets excellent and usable reception with Lion. The most likely reason is actually a combination of factors:

• Newer (i.e. more features, fewer bugs) wireless drivers
• Better methods for coping with wireless interference
• Support for more features in wireless routers

These things taken together result in improved reception.

Perhaps there's a new unsecured connection in the neighborhood your dad is leeching from? (unintentionally of course).

I found my daughter connected to the hag across the street once. She didn't know how it happened.

dh2005 said:

Hello all,

This is not a problem that I need help with; I'm just confused about something.

My father installed Lion to his 2010 15" MBP, and said to me over the phone that he was suddenly able to get wireless internet reception in the upstairs of the house. I rejected this as nonsense for two reasons: number 1, there's never been workable reception upstairs for laptops (PC or Mac) since my father went wireless six years ago, and number 2, why the Hell would installing a new operating system improve wireless reception?! Surely that's a hardware/walls-and-floors issue...?

But he's right. I've come home for a few weeks, and after installing Lion, I can now access the internet wirelessly from my old bedroom. When I was using Snow Leopard - both on this MBP, and an iMac that I've since sold - and Windows Vista - on a 2008 Sony Vaio - I couldn't. How has Lion managed to achieve this when Windows and previous iterations of OS X have not?

Thanks in advance,



DH.

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Sounds like there was a driver update that cleaned up some issues with the wireless card in the laptop.

Agreed, driver was updated and therefore you get a better connection.

dh2005 said:

So, Apple have managed to achieve something remarkable with this new generation of drivers? That's it?! Because, honestly; Snow Leopard couldn't even connect to my father's router from the bedroom. Now, I'm getting four or five megabits, sustained, at peak time.

Whatever Apple have done with this, I'm damned impressed.

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megabits or megabytes? 5megabits is pretty atrocious for a wireless network; it is "just barely hanging on" as it were.

dh2005 said:

Megabits. Hence, I wrote "megabits". About 500KB/s.

Here in the house we have a nominally twenty-megabit supply that generally doesn't get above ten. That's pretty standard, here in Britain. If you'd like to flop-out your mile-long e-cock, I'd be delighted to wax it for you.

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I think the previous poster was talking about internal network speed, not internet speed. What speed can you transfer files on the same network at? If it's 500megabits that is poor for a home network but more expected for internet.

This thread is not about internet access. This thread is about wireless router connectivity. You explained as much in your original post. Internet access is not wireless. The internet comes into your house on a wire. It is then piped into a wireless access point (wireless router). Thus, you are not wirelessly connecting to the internet. You are wirelessly connecting to your LAN.

The speed of your connection coming into the house is completely unrelated to the speed at which your machine connects to your wireless router.

You seem impressed by your 5mbit wifi connection, and I am indeed happy for you that you and your father can access your home network from the second floor of the house.

However, 5mbit is only ~10% throughput for a 54G network (which I have assumed, for the sake of discussion, you are using). This is not a huge increase in performance. From below the threshhold of connectivity to 10% connectivity is not, in my eyes,

something remarkable

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In fact I would venture to guess you would not have noticed a difference in wireless throughput at all, had you not been in the particular situation you find yourself in now, where you are trying to access a wireless network from a location that is nearly outside the range of the router.

No waxing will be required, thank you. The fatness of my pipe, or lack thereof, is of no concern to anyone and unrelated to this conversation.