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New MBA 13" base with wifi trouble; it MAY BE (the router more than) bluetooth

J

JRaff

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 16, 2012
27
1
So I've had my brand new 13" MBA home for a few hours now and I am still so excited; this is great.

I was having trouble with the wifi speeds however, my PC was getting ~20 Mbps on speakeasy and my iPhone and iPad were doing well into the 10's but my new MBA was barely hitting 1 Mbps.

I looked around and saw people turning off the bluetooth on their new laptop because of the possibility of interference so I gave this a try and it seemed to barely help. I sulked around for a bit more and then realized both my iPhone/iPad also had bluetooth on. I turned those off and the Lion update that was going to take ~4 hours is now down to 50 minutes.

So if you've seen this issue and turned off the laptop's bluetooth, don't forget other nearby devices' bluetooth as well! I LOVE THIS!


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iPhone 4s 32GB VZ | iPad 2 32GB Wi-Fi | Apple TV 2 | 2011 MBA 13" base
 
Last edited:
Yea, that is true; I get what you're saying. RFI can be caused by many different things going on in someones home.

In my case it seemed to be the bluetooth, and the fact I forgot some other personal area network devices still had it on in a very short vicinity to the MBA was the issue. I don't have an airport yet, still using a linksys wrt54g2.
 
Yes.

Anyway, it turns out that wasn't a perfect solution either. I power cycled the modem and the router, in that order, and unplugged/dc'ed all other devices beforehand. When I connect the MBA the wifi light on the router goes from solid to absolutely nutty blinking. For some reason it looks like the MBA is hitting the router hard. and it's actually slowing everything else down as well.
 
All my 2011 Airs struggled to get on the net, so I sold them. Weren't worth the hassle for me, though otherwise, excellent little computers.
 
hard code your dns server numbers in network settings or try googles,open dns,verizons ect....makes a world of difference...
 
Right, thanks for the help. Currently using Googles 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4 because it previously did make a huge difference on my network for all my computers. But this seems to be a problem with when my mba conencts. I suppose I'll try other routers first, and maybe wiring it.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

My air does not connect to wifi until I hit the icon in the top right. Does not ask for my pw, but I do have to hit the icon.
Tried a couple times with the BT off, and it joined my network automatically. Old MacBook and iMac has no trouble joining whatsoever.
 
Well, let me explain what my setup was before I get into what I did:
I have a motorola modem I purchased myself from newegg, I have 2 linksys routers, a WRT54g2 and a WRT54GS (I think; black, no external antennas). I had the WRT54GS with stock firmware connected to the modem. I had the G2 with ddwrt connected to the gs so I could have more hardwired ethernet ports for my devices (tv, blueray, pc, xbox, onlive.. lots of stuff I didn't want on wifi).

I previously disconnected the G2 and all wires fro mthe Gs so it was the modem connected to the WRT54gs which had wifi on. This did not work.

Today I factory reset both routers, disconnected the Gs and used only the wrt54g2 with ddwrt. Now my mba is showing ~15Mbps on speakeasy speedtest where yesterday it was under 1 Mbps. This is on par with my PC and does not affect my other devices on the network like it did yesterday.
 
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