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Not connecting to preferred networks automatically

agentphish

agentphish

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Sep 7, 2004
1,140
0
When waking from sleep, my 2011 air will not auto-join my 5ghz wifi network.

My network is coming from a 2011 Airport Extreme Dual Band.

It worked 100% of the time perfectly before I changed to the 2011 AEDB. Previously I had a 2009 version of the same Dual Band router.

Any ideas? Seems strange to me. It's all apple gear.
 
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)

I heard there is a bug in 10.7.2 the causes issues with the air and it not auto connecting to wi-fi. Apparently turning off Bluetooth helps.
 
yeah I don't use bluetooth. Only network in my preferred networks is my 5ghz.

I killed the systemconfig file last night and rebooted, today after a day at work, It did connect properly, maybe just a corrupt pref file. I dunno.
 
I have 2 Wi-fi access points in my house. one in the basement, one upstairs.

when i'm downstairs, it auto connects to the 1 bar upstairs signal

when i'm upstairs it auto connects to the 1 bar downstairs signal.

never does it seem to be smart enough to connect to the closest highest signal.

if i'm upstairs and it can't see downstairs, it pops up and asks

if i'm downstairs and it can't see the upstairs, it pop ups and asks

I think my wi-fi on the laptop is trolling me
 
well both the 2 and 5ghz have full signal everywhere in my house. it's a duplex but is a decent size at 1500 sq. ft. I never had an issue with my previous AEBS.

This one, though I read the signal and range were supposed to be better on the 2011 model, has proven no better in terms of overall signal strength. Not sure why that is considering it does have extra antennas.
 
issue is intermittent at this point. Have been sleeping and waking my MBA at various intervals all day long as I have been home. I'd say about 30% of the time it does not auto-connect to my preferred network and brings up the window asking me what network to connect to when I wake it.

This is a bummer. It's so strange though because I have to believe that it could be related to my new Airport Extreme because I never had this issue with the old (2009) one.
 
It's a known issue with Lion. I've heard reports that this is largely fixed with the 10.7.3 beta.
 
KPOM said:
It's a known issue with Lion. I've heard reports that this is largely fixed with the 10.7.3 beta.
Click to expand...
how about windows?

anyone run their Air with win7 and notice if the same issue happens?
 
I had the same problem (as many others, i presume) and I took my air into the Apple store and they pretty much deleted the system config file and did a reboot. It now automatically connects to my preferred network every time, without any problems :)
 
fixed the issue for the time being by completely wiping all wireless profiles and starting from scratch
 
I have the same issue. It's completely intermittent and happens on n and g wifi networks on both channels. I haven't tried lord vic's suggestion yet.
 
I have tried resetting up the whole Wi-Fi and I am still plagued by this problem.


Also if anyone could point me in the direction for why the internet will be working fine for a while and then just stop. I will then try network diagnostics and it shows the bottom two lights yellow, as shown in the picture. Already tried turning on/off modem, router, and Airport. On the old UFO looking AirPort Extreme in case you're wondering.
 

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my issue is still ongoing. I've tried all sorts of stuff i've found online and suggested to me by my friend who's in the know at an apple service provider.
 
As I stated before on Dec 19, 2011 07:10 PM I do not use bluetooth at all. I know very well how to turn it on and off. I've been a mac user for 10 years at this point...Frankly I hate bluetooth...

It has been turned off since I got my machine. ;)
 
again what is so strange is that I had ZERO issues when I had my 2009 model dual band. Literally the first day I had my 2011 model at the beginning of December I began to have this issue, however I have reproduced it now with other brands of routers.
 
WIFI not found.

I have been having problems with my 2011 MBA with it not connecting to my airport express. So I have changed the settings to 5ghz wireless N and set the multicast rate to 24mbps and use wide channels. And so far all is good no connection problems from wakeup.
Hope this helps.
 
agentphish said:
As I stated before on Dec 19, 2011 07:10 PM I do not use bluetooth at all. I know very well how to turn it on and off. I've been a mac user for 10 years at this point...Frankly I hate bluetooth...

It has been turned off since I got my machine. ;)
Click to expand...

trying to help, regardless of whether you use bluetooth or not has no bearing on if it is on.
 
theIlluminati said:
I have been having problems with my 2011 MBA with it not connecting to my airport express. So I have changed the settings to 5ghz wireless N and set the multicast rate to 24mbps and use wide channels. And so far all is good no connection problems from wakeup.
Hope this helps.
Click to expand...

This is interesting information. I will check it out, test, and let you know what I find with my setup. Thanks!
 
So I have slept and woke twice at random intervals since my last post, so far so good.

In my Airport Extreme I changed from Multicast: Medium to Multicast: High and changed my WPA Group Key Timeout from 1 hour to several days.

I will continue to post further results.
 
I had the same problem and I turned off "ask to join new networks" in network preferences and it fixed the problem.
 
Exactly the same issue as described by agentphish.

This fix sound interesting:

So I have changed the settings to 5ghz wireless N and set the multicast rate to 24mbps and use wide channels. And so far all is good no connection problems from wakeup.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately I bought MBA for its portability. I need to connect to a 10 or more different WiFi networks of my customers every day. Would be a real pain to ask them to re-configurate their routers because I own a MBA :confused:.
I am seriously disappointed and I hope they release a patch soon
 
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