FINALLY stable wifi

[stewacide]

Since I upgraded to Lion my wifi has been freezing every couple minutes. I held out hope that 10.7.1 would fix it; it didn't. Today I installed the 10.7.2 GM... still no fix!!

Then I found this: http://rys.pixeltards.com/2011/09/04/osx-lion-wifi.html

Downgrading to SL drivers made wifi 100% stable again!!! This may also have solved the less frequent but still incredibly annoying Lion system lockups, but it's too early to say for sure (good so far).

Why on earth did Apple not only release but stick with such horribly buggy obviously unstable drivers through three point releases now?!? Near as I can tell the only feature added was Airdrop; hardly worth the price of flaky wifi.

edit -- nope, system killing beachball hangs still there

 

[PeterHolbrook]

Downgrading to SL drivers made wifi 100% stable again!!!(

Wow! Amazing! Can you please enlighten me as to how I can make wifi stable on an old MacBook Pro (Core Duo) wherein Lion CAN'T be installed? It's running Snow Leopard (and Leopard before that) and wifi has ALWAYS been unstable. Do you think Lion might be to blame, somehow?

 

[Steve's Barber]

I'd try the driver downgrade but I had Wi-Fi issues in snow leopard as well.

Ironically, I haven't had a Wi-Fi drop out in about 2 weeks now and I've done absolutely nothing to fix it. Maybe the gopher that's been gnawing on my underground phone line finally died or he's hunkering down for the winter.

I can see why Apple is having a hard time chasing this anomaly down.

 

[Rob.G]

I wonder if this is related to older hardware, or upgrading from Snow Leopard? Both of my Macs are Lion-native and have no Wi-Fi issues. My MBA does have a tendency to not auto-reconnect to known networks (e.g. my home nentwork) but that's it.

Rob

 

[nicklad]

It's Apple's driver for the Atheros AR5008 that is at fault. I replaced the wireless card in a Late 2007 Macbook Pro with an Atheros AR9380 from eBay which uses a different KEXT and all is well.