Do wifi cards in iMac slow down as they age

[djrobsd]

I have a late 2012 iMac running OS X Sierra. It has been working FLAWLESSLY for the nearly 6 years that I've had her. Recently, I have been having some issues with my meetings at work disconnecting, and slowdowns on the internet. It's connected via wifi in a single story 1300 square foot home (mostly drywall, some plaster walls still remain). The router is dead center in the middle of the house, and is the latest gen of AirPort Extreme.

Upon discovering said issues with wifi, I did a bunch of ping tests to the router, and noticed they were ll over the board, anywhere from 1000ms down to .0917ms. Some packets were timing out. So, naturally being the tinkerer that I am, I paid $20 and got Wifi Explorer for OS X and did a little digging. It turns out, my neighbor has one of those new google mesh networks. It looks like in the 2.4GHZ band, he's occupying 2 spots on channel 1, and 1 spot on channel 6. At the high end, one of my other neighbors has a netgear router taking up channel 12. I notice that wifi overlaps channels anyway, so no matter what channel I select I'm going to hit those. I've tried channel 1, 4, 6, 8, and 12 with very little improvement in the issues on my iMac. I've tried changing the name of the 5GHZ network and tuning only into 5GHZ to no improvement.

So, I was almost ready to just go to Best Buy and one up my neighbors with a new wifi system, but then I decided to dig deeper. I have a 2012 retina MBP, and so I placed it right in front of my iMac, and did some ping tests. Here are the results after 5 minutes:

RMBP - 427 packetsTX, 426RX, 0.2% packet loss
0.783/10.161/421.880max/29.449stddev

iMac - 432 Packetstx, 429RX, 0.7% packet loss
0.898/100.433/2253.668/213.233 sttdv

So it looks like the retina Mac sitting in the same spot as my iMac is getting an average of 10ms, the iMac 100.

Does that mean my wifi card in the iMac is having issues? Do they just wear out and get old?

Should I get a new router? I work from home so this is a huge problem for me, one I'm also having my company's IT look into but I thought I'd throw that out there to see if anyone has heard of this type of issue on the iMac's built in wireless network card.
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I have a late 2012 iMac running OS X Sierra. It has been working FLAWLESSLY for the nearly 6 years that I've had her. Recently, I have been having some issues with my meetings at work disconnecting, and slowdowns on the internet. It's connected via wifi in a single story 1300 square foot home (mostly drywall, some plaster walls still remain). The router is dead center in the middle of the house, and is the latest gen of AirPort Extreme.

Upon discovering said issues with wifi, I did a bunch of ping tests to the router, and noticed they were ll over the board, anywhere from 1000ms down to .0917ms. Some packets were timing out. So, naturally being the tinkerer that I am, I paid $20 and got Wifi Explorer for OS X and did a little digging. It turns out, my neighbor has one of those new google mesh networks. It looks like in the 2.4GHZ band, he's occupying 2 spots on channel 1, and 1 spot on channel 6. At the high end, one of my other neighbors has a netgear router taking up channel 12. I notice that wifi overlaps channels anyway, so no matter what channel I select I'm going to hit those. I've tried channel 1, 4, 6, 8, and 12 with very little improvement in the issues on my iMac. I've tried changing the name of the 5GHZ network and tuning only into 5GHZ to no improvement.

So, I was almost ready to just go to Best Buy and one up my neighbors with a new wifi system, but then I decided to dig deeper. I have a 2012 retina MBP, and so I placed it right in front of my iMac, and did some ping tests. Here are the results after 5 minutes:

RMBP - 427 packetsTX, 426RX, 0.2% packet loss
0.783/10.161/421.880max/29.449stddev

iMac - 432 Packetstx, 429RX, 0.7% packet loss
0.898/100.433/2253.668/213.233 sttdv

So it looks like the retina Mac sitting in the same spot as my iMac is getting an average of 10ms, the iMac 100.

Does that mean my wifi card in the iMac is having issues? Do they just wear out and get old?

Should I get a new router? I work from home so this is a huge problem for me, one I'm also having my company's IT look into but I thought I'd throw that out there to see if anyone has heard of this type of issue on the iMac's built in wireless network card.

UPDATE: Plugged in an old airport express (the one that looks like a macbook pro charger) under my desk, hard wired ethernet from the imac to airport express new ping times below:

455 packets transmitted, 455 packets received, 0.0% packet loss

round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.833/6.511/720.504/46.033 ms

Easy peasy fix I guess, but I'm still wondering about the built in wifi card in the iMac if it's worn out.

 

[Azeroth1]

I’ve never heard of such a thing as this. I would guess it’s more likely related to some sort of hardware failure, but not “unique” to an iMac or a iMac specific card.

 

[kohlson]

WiFi is always challenging. But one possibility is your neighbor's new mesh system is interfering with your system, as you suspected. Radio waves are analog, and the signal you get depends on a lot of things. Too many walls, metal or concrete/brick of any type, windows with reflective film - these are things that can affect your signal.

Never heard of wifi cards degrading gracefully. Only working or not.

 

[Fishrrman]

Question:
"Do wifi cards in iMac slow down as they age"

Answer:
No.

Seems to me they will either "work", or... "not work".
Your "slowdown" is coming from... somewhere else.

 

[mj_]

Wi-Fi cards cannot possibly slow down as they age as that would presume some sort of physical process of degradation. However, as there are no mechanical parts involved in transferring bits wirelessly Wi-Fi modems are always 100% digital: they either work or they don't. There is no in-between.

What can change, however, are drivers. I have an older TPLink USB Wi-Fi dongle with a Realtek Wi-Fi chip that is completely unusable with the latest drivers but works perfectly fine with older 2016 drivers. Maybe you're experiencing a firmware/driver issue with your iMac? It would be highly unlikely but at least possible.

 

[djrobsd]

UPDATE. After installing the airport express extender and plugging my mac in, it worked perfectly for a few days, and then ouch, problem came back in a big way on a conference call. Some ping times were 20000ms and lots of timeouts for a bit, in and out. So, I then downloaded a tool on my iPhone called "Net Analyzer" (Free version) and it has a ping tool on it, so I pinged my router continuously from my iPhone, low and behold SAME Issue!!!

I've had the Airport Extreme (latest gen) for 4 years of solid performance, even in my 2 story town home it worked great (now I live in a single story house 1300SF). All of a sudden today she just decides to stop playing nice?! I wonder if Apple released some buggy drivers or something?

Anyway, I ran down to my nearest store and got the Netgear Nighthawk AC router, and now performance is flawless, check this out:

--- 10.0.1.1 ping statistics ---
4938 packets transmitted, 4937 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.645/1.119/88.256/2.609 ms

So, again I would ask do routers and wireless transmitter/receivers just get tired or what the hell Apple did you release some buggy firmware for my router that messed it up?