Mid 2013 MBA WiFi issue

[pvmacguy]

recently got my wife a 11” MBA mid 2013. Having an issue with WiFi. Yes I’ve rebooted the router many times. I’ve also relocated it somewhere more central in our home.

If the MBA is in the living room closest to the router it works fine. If you go into any room off the living room it shows full signal but acts like it has no connection and crawls.

I’ve done some reading and saw there was a software update when these originally came out for WiFi but the machine is up to date. I suspect it may be a bad airport card. I did a visual inspection of the card and it’s fine and antenna points visually look OK as well.

Any thoughts? It’s also updated with high sierra.

 

[Audit13]

You could order a replacement wifi card off ebay for a low price to see if that solves the issue; however, given your description, I would try this:

1) remove and re-seat the airport card;
2) clean installation of High Sierra;
3) inspect the antenna wires leading away from the airport card to possible damage or loose connections; and/or
4) try and external USB wifi dongle.

 

[pvmacguy]

You could order a replacement wifi card off ebay for a low price to see if that solves the issue; however, given your description, I would try this:

1) remove and re-seat the airport card;
2) clean installation of High Sierra;
3) inspect the antenna wires leading away from the airport card to possible damage or loose connections; and/or
4) try and external USB wifi dongle.

Thanks Audit13. I tried 1 and 3 yesterday and also ordered an airport card off eBay for like $13 which isn’t much.

Twist, I usually just used the xfinity modem with WiFi. This morning I hooked up an airport express I had in the closet and connected just the MBA to it and it works fine in every room. So now I’m not sure if this is a software issue with High Sierra or something up with the modem.

 

[Audit13]

Could be a compatibility issue between the xfinity modem and airport card.

Does this happen with other Macbooks?

 

[pvmacguy]

2009 MBP works fine as well as my 2015 retina MacBook. It’s localized to just this one (new) machine.

 

[Audit13]

Based on your tests, I say it's the modem that the MBA doesn't like.

 

[pvmacguy]

Well it stopped working away from the airport express too. So I wiped High Sierra and re-installed and tried to set it up in a room outside where the routers are. None worked and as soon as I came into the room setup process started working.

So I suspect it’s the airport card in the unit. Have one on the way and will report back if that’s the culprit in-case someone else has any experience like this.

 

[pvmacguy]

Update: I received the new replacement airport card yesterday and now everything is working as it should. Guess the old card was the culprit on the weird wifi behavior.

 

[pvmacguy]

So update again: everything was working well on the machine until recently. My wife has an external display and Bluetooth keyboard/mouse (Apple ones) when Bluetooth connects to the periferals, WiFi still shows connected but it’s stops working and says no connection. As soon as you disconnect the devices everything works again as intended. You don’t have to turn Bluetooth completely off just disconnect. This seems like a software issue. I read about Yosemite people having this issue with a Bluetooth PAN in the network section. I removed it just to see and that did not help.

Any thoughts?