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When the hell is Apple gonna fix the Wireless problem in Leopard?!

new.chaos, thanks much for the detailed reply. So my main wireless connection is to my Macbook Pro which is the Core 2 Duo that was shipped with an "n" card, although it wasn't listed at the time probably because the "n" specification was still a couple years back in its infancy. My desktops I'm still restricting to 5e cables.

Are there advantages to the Airport Extreme over a similar LinkSys router? The Airport still seems to be ridiculously pricey, but if it has better support and integration for Macs then I'll go with it. Mainly I want to ensure compatibility with the NAT feature - speed isn't important since I have too many terabytes to use Time Machine for backup, I just would like a shared "always on" wirelessly accessible location for some data, with the most reliability and security possible. I don't need to extend the range of my network, so I'd probably switch my Airport Express to be a separate network solely for streaming iTunes to my stereo; is the Airport Extreme more likely to have less interference with that setup than a linksys?
 
Maddler said:
new.chaos, thanks much for the detailed reply. So my main wireless connection is to my Macbook Pro which is the Core 2 Duo that was shipped with an "n" card, although it wasn't listed at the time probably because the "n" specification was still a couple years back in its infancy. My desktops I'm still restricting to 5e cables.

Are there advantages to the Airport Extreme over a similar LinkSys router? The Airport still seems to be ridiculously pricey, but if it has better support and integration for Macs then I'll go with it. Mainly I want to ensure compatibility with the NAT feature - speed isn't important since I have too many terabytes to use Time Machine for backup, I just would like a shared "always on" wirelessly accessible location for some data, with the most reliability and security possible. I don't need to extend the range of my network, so I'd probably switch my Airport Express to be a separate network solely for streaming iTunes to my stereo; is the Airport Extreme more likely to have less interference with that setup than a linksys?
Click to expand...

Both Linksys and Apple make what I would call "tier 1" routers in the consumer/residential market. Apple in particular has been really aggressive on adding features, and I believe was first major name brand to market a dual-band (2.4 & 5) 802.11n router. Apple was also aggressive in including 802.11n in its laptops.

Apple's Airport Extreme Base Station (AEBS), has the following qualities:

  • Apple uses the Atheros chipset which is I believe the most respected chipset among people who know 802.11n electronics well. Atheros was one of the companies who took an early lead in developing 802.11n.
  • Excellent print & file sharing capabilities (USB-based); should work well with Windows clients, it is using Samba, the same as e.g., Linux does when acting as a file server for Windows clients.
  • Easy configuration with Airport Utility. However some people don't like this. Almost all other routers on the market use some web interface and the AEBS does not offer one. Mainly people such as Linux users complain about this, but not sure why other people would.
  • Dual-band (aka "Dual-N"), but it's not "simultaneous" dual-band. You must decide whether you want to use 2.4 or 5 in the configuration. The Atheros chipset supports simultaneous feature, but Apple hasn't enabled it, and no idea when/if they will.
  • Connection security is good with WPA2 and AES. However Apple neglected to put a decent firewall in the AEBS and this is puzzling since the other features are solid.
  • There is only one model of the AEBS in production at any one time, if you don't count the Time Capsule.

Linksys

  • Uses a Broadcom chipset, which is I would guess probably as good as Atheros generally. Both have demonstrated interoperability with each other and the vast majority, if not all, 802.11n clients.
  • Unlike the AEBS, the current generation of 802.11n Linksys routers have 4 different product offerings. Which range from around $50 to $200. 3 of the 4 have pretty much the same radio hardware.
  • WRT160N - entry level model with 100Mbit wired networking
  • WRT310N - basically same as 160N but with 1000Mbit
  • WRT330N - a "gaming" variation of the 310N with different antennas, some "radical" looking design painted on it, and some packet queuing logic optimized for low-latency multiplayer gaming and Voice over IP apps. This smells like a marketing price markup scheme to me. I think the software feature could have been trivially added to the 310N, and ultimately I don't know how much difference it really makes.
  • WRT610N - This is the router Linksys offers with dual-band feature. It offers true simultaneous dual-band. The catch is, your client needs to have an adapter that supports simultaneous dual-band or the feature itself goes to waste. But if you are looking for true simultaneous dual-band features and don't want to guess about whether Apple will enable it on the AEBS, this is the router you should get.
  • Linksys has a decent stateful inspection firewall included with the product
  • Linksys is known to be the most broadly compatible wifi router you can buy.
  • Lacks the file & print sharing abilities of the AEBS.

In terms of "interference", yes, 802.11n should help you in that area. One of the design goals of "n" was to address the jamming / interference / crowding problems with 802.11b and g.

Hope that helps you make a decision. I personally could go either way, but I happen to own the 802.11n AEBS and it has served me very well for maybe a year or more now.
 
Oh right, the firewall - I knew there was something else I was forgetting. So I was hoping that the jump from an Airport Express to the Extreme would come with a good strong hardware firewall, but it sounds like that's not the case. Could I run my old Linksys non-wireless router in-line between the cable modem and the AEBS, or would that cause conflicts?
 
Maddler said:
Oh right, the firewall - I knew there was something else I was forgetting. So I was hoping that the jump from an Airport Express to the Extreme would come with a good strong hardware firewall, but it sounds like that's not the case. Could I run my old Linksys non-wireless router in-line between the cable modem and the AEBS, or would that cause conflicts?
Click to expand...

Well, the AEBS has a firewall. It's just not a stateful packet inspection firewall as the Linksys has. Without going into a lot of detail about that, let's just say the SPI firewalls are better.

There are two schools of thought. One says that above all to have good security you need a good firewall protecting your network.

The other says that the "walled garden" approach to security is a bad one; i.e. hard on the outside, soft on the inside. So obsessing over the quality of your router's firewall is pointless if your computer is inherently insecure.

IMO the answer is to do a layered approach. Firewall at the gateway, firewall on your computer itself, utilities like NoScript for Firefox to make web browsing less risky, and even anti-virus just to be a good citizen amongst Windows peers. AEBS firewall isn't "strong" and neither is the firewall in Leopard. Neither do stateful packet inspection (the SysPref->Security firewall in Leopard is an application firewall). ipfw, which comes from FreeBSD is still included with Leopard, and that does SPI, but it's not a point-and-click affair.

I think the AEBS firewall is fine as long as that's not the only thing you're doing. After all, an SPI firewall at home is pointless when you hook up a vulnerable computer to a public wifi network such as Starbucks. :D
 
OMG are we all still having problems with this? I can't believe apple have been so tardy over this. Shame on them. I really think the wheels are starting to come off apple if they can;t even get simple things like this right.
 
I had the same problem, wireless kept dropping. Both on my and PC. Turns out I had channel conflicts with cordless phone and other local wireless routers.
 
fluidedge said:
OMG are we all still having problems with this? I can't believe apple have been so tardy over this. Shame on them. I really think the wheels are starting to come off apple if they can;t even get simple things like this right.
Click to expand...
It seems a bit presumptuous to blame Apple. Are you sure that, for instance, all routers follow the 802.11(x) specs properly, no one has installed crapware that interferes, user error can be ruled out? Sometimes I see people blaming their wifi while later it turned out to be something else, like their DNS servers.

I have had 3-4 Netgear routers in the time I have been using wifi (all costed less than $100). Not one of my PowerBooks/MBPs has had a wifi problem except one issue in the very early days of 802.11n that a router firmware upgrade fixed. Was that Apple's fault?
 
Got Mine Fixed at Mall of America Genius Bar!!

Long story short.....an Install and Archive of Leopard as recommended by a Genius seems to have fixed my issues!

Long story long.....I'm an American, but have transferred to Australia for work and then was sent on temporary assignment to Russia. This is just background to explain some of the circumstances that come up below.

When I found out I was going to Russia, I decided I needed a MacBook to be able to Skype with my other half back in Australia, so I bought a refurbished White Mac Book from Apple Australia and upgraded the hard drive and memory to exceed blackbook specs. I then decided to buy 2 Airport Extreme Base Stations, one for Australia and one for Russia as it seemed that that would be the most trouble free way to ensure that "Back to My Mac" would work and that I could access my Australian Macs from Russia.

My MacBook seemed to have some connectivity issues with the AEBS that I left in Australia. When I was there it would seem to frequently drop signal. One thing I discovered is that when I had the MB's Airport Settings set to show the length of time of the AEBS's PPoE connection, the time would frequently disappear and reappear everytime it seemed to have connection difficulties. My partner who has a Dell had no issues connecting to the Australian AEBS.

I got to Russia and set up the other AEBS there. I didn't have any issues and had a good, steady connection. But everytime I returned to Australia, I'd have the same problems as before. I figured maybe something was wrong with the one AEBS but had no way to know for sure and didn't have time to figure it out. I had purchased AppleCare for my MB and was hoping to eventually solve the problem when I had some time.

Well I was in the States for Thanksgiving and stayed with my sister who just has some sort of Best Buy store brand wireless router. My MB had just as bad, if not worse, performance with her router as with the AEBS back in Australia. Again, my partner's Dell worked just fine! grrr!

I took my MB into the Mall of America Apple Store. As I was waiting for the Genius, I played with the wireless and was frustrated that it was working "perfectly." I figured great, I finally have the time and am at the right place and won't be able to repeat the problem. I finally got my turn and the first thing the Genius did was to go to the Network Utility and run a ping test to www.google.com with 100 pings. The results came back saying 56% packet loss!! Even on what appeared to me to be a "perfect" connection.

He first erased some of the files associated with the wireless settings saying that they would be recreated with a reboot and that sometimes that fixes the problems. Well, afterwards I still had exactly 56% packet loss. What was interesting to me is that it was always 56% no matter how many times the test was run or how many pings were tried. So it is a very consistent problem, not really intermittant. I wonder if the results would have been consistently lower if I was trying it on one of the routers that had been failing me??

Then he recommended doing an "archive and install" which basically does a clean install but leaves all of your old system and applications, etc in a folder called "previous systems." He told me to do this at home and said the Genius's aren't supposed to let a customer reinstall software at the Genius Bar. I explained that I was in the US, but that my installation disks were in Australia and that I was about to go to Russia for 3 months. So he got an installation disk and let me do the work there, but he had to move on to other customers.

At the end, I had 0% packet loss! Repeated the test several times with no loss!!! I have returned to Russia and haven't had the chance to try my MB with the Australian AEBS, but with the one here I now also have 0 packet loss. I have no idea what it was before, but seeing that I had loss in the Apple Store with what appeared to be a properly functioning connection makes me suspect I was getting some degree of loss with all connections.

So, it seems to me that a clean install should help (or at least an archive and install). It's been a bit of a pain to get everything functioning correctly by dragging it out of the previous systems folder, but for the most part I think I have everything re-done. iWork seemed to be missing a bunch of files by just dragging the application icons over, but I just downloaded and installed the "free trial" iWork from apple.com and then re-authorised it with my key that I got from home in Australia.

I was very pleased by the service at the genius bar. It is unfortunate that there seems to be something that causes the wireless configuration to get screwed up and that there doesn't seem to be an easier way to fix it than through a complete re-installation of the system. But I know that the same sort of crap can happen on a Windows system and there's nothing comparable to the Genius system to help out. I could have gone crazy trying to figure it out myself and not know if the problem was my computer or one of my routers. Of course there's gonna be variation in the genius-ness of the Geniuses as well, but I got lucky!
 
macrem said:
It seems a bit presumptuous to blame Apple. Are you sure that, for instance, all routers follow the 802.11(x) specs properly, no one has installed crapware that interferes, user error can be ruled out? Sometimes I see people blaming their wifi while later it turned out to be something else, like their DNS servers.

I have had 3-4 Netgear routers in the time I have been using wifi (all costed less than $100). Not one of my PowerBooks/MBPs has had a wifi problem except one issue in the very early days of 802.11n that a router firmware upgrade fixed. Was that Apple's fault?
Click to expand...

Actually mate, with all due respect, if you actually look through the thread from the start (and I never thought the thread would get this long!) you'll realise that quite a lot of the people with the problem had NO issues when they were using Tiger on the SAME hardware. Tiger for me worked perfectly on my 17" MBP but as soon as I installed Leopard the problems began.

I don't know how many people on this thread now actually have their wireless working but if there are still people out there with problems then it's surprising and sad Apple haven't got to the bottom of it after all this time.
 
sheepopo39 said:
thats odd because I don't have the internet problem on my macbook
Click to expand...

Yeah, that was the weird thing about this problem: it was so random. Some people with the same hardware had it while others didn't which made it even more frustating when trying to diagnose it.

The fact that there's been a big gap between posts on this thread makes me believe that most people got their problem sorted by either one of the firmware or software updates, buying a new Mac or having to buy a new router (which is bad because they had to spend more money on a problem they never had before), downgraded to Tiger, used a wired connection or they simply gave up complaining!

I remember when one of the Leopard updates came out there were suddenly all these people who had never had wireless problems with Leopard who started experiencing them! I hope history doesn't repeat itself with Snow Leopard...
 
sheepopo39 said:
thats odd because I don't have the internet problem on my macbook
Click to expand...
Me neither. Not at home, nor at countless wifi access points where I have had no trouble networking my MBP running Leopard with multiple brands of wifi routers.
 
macrem said:
Me neither. Not at home, nor at countless wifi access points where I have had no trouble networking my MBP running Leopard with multiple brands of wifi routers.
Click to expand...

21 pages worth of people have unfortunatly. I've gave up and went hard wired long ago.
 
fluidedge said:
21 pages worth of people have unfortunatly. I've gave up and went hard wired long ago.
Click to expand...

Yeah and i just bought a new wireless router.. I switched from a D-Link to a Linksys router with OpenWrt as the firmware. No longer connection and stability problems here. But the problem itself and how apple was not able to fix it... #§$%&/ Too funny that the D-Link router worked well for Tiger, Windows and Linux here.. just not for Leopard. Anyway the new one works well.
 
The @#!$! problem came back with 10.5.6

I am still having these problems after the update to 10.5.6. They had gone away, but now, to use my MacBook at home, I have to use Windows XP on Bootcamp... OSX does work on the University's and Work's network.

I may end up buying an Airport Extreme to see if that finally makes it work. I don't want to expend that kind of money, though. Come on Apple, fix it for 10.5.7, fast!!!

(FWIW, I have a Linksys WRT54G running DD-WRT and an Airport Express as a repeater)
 
Hi all,

I have read as much of this thread as I possibly can, its very long and hard to find the most useful bits of info.

I definitely have the problem in question though. I have a 6 month old iMac and a Linksys WAG354G wireless router, but without doubt I am seeing my wireless signal in the Mac drop and weaken constantly.

I have tried a few different configurations but seen no improvement. I am also not a technical wonder and I must confess I don't really get the difference between N,G routers etc.

Is anyone able to be kind enough to summarise on this thread what the issue seems to be and what the best course of action to take is please?

Do I wait for an Apple fix? Do I set my router to something in particular? Do I buy a new one? I just don't know where to start :(

Thank you!
 
thought I would chip in to say that I constantly get connection timeout to my router, even though before i updated the OS to 10.5.6 the wireless was working perfectly...

Hoping 10.5.7 is coming soon and addresses this problem!
 
I have similar issues and I HAVEN'T yet upgraded to Leopard from Tiger [10.4.11]. Everything has been smooth with my MBP 2CD until December or so then, the wireless connection started getting dicey. I've since bricked a Linksys WRT200n and am currently working with a wireless router/modem that was provided to me by my ISP [Cable IN, Wireless OUT].

The signal constantly fluctuates from full to none and periodically drops the signal altogether and I'm forced to manually join my own network again. This is also happening when I'm sitting RIGHT BESIDE THE ROUTER!

I'm at my wit's end. I'm going to bring my laptop to the office tomorrow to test the wireless. If it fails here, I don't know what to do. I thought maybe it was a TIGER update but now, reading all these LEOPARD issue, I'm not so sure.

Stay tuned.

In the meantime, any suggestions are welcome.
 
frontman said:
Is anyone able to be kind enough to summarise on this thread what the issue seems to be and what the best course of action to take is please?

Do I wait for an Apple fix? Do I set my router to something in particular? Do I buy a new one? I just don't know where to start :(

Thank you!
Click to expand...

I've been subscribed to this thread for a long time now, seen many people with many different macs (including the two i've had in that time) and the only thing that appears to be consistent is the OS. I think that sadly it is an OSX problem, although some people seem to have more luck than others... drop outs are quite rare for me, although wireless won't work if I have an external screen plugged in by DVI!

I guess we'll all have to sit tight and see if apple gives us any kind of software update. It seems as if there are such a wide range of problems, just all to do with wireless.

Anyway sorry I couldn't suggest anything other than that. Perhaps try doing an mroogle search of the forums to see if anyone has anything specific to your problem... but I don't know how much luck you will have. All the best.
 
I now have this airport drop-out problem. I have a Linksys WRT54G2 router. The problem started this month. First I maintained a connection for 7 days, then the signal dropped and I needed to re-start. Ever since then the time I can stay connected has steadily decreased. I am now at the stage where the signal will drop about 20 mins after a re-start. I find that every time I watch a TV show on my Apple TV, I have to re-start in order to watch the next show. The airport in the menu bar greys out and apple TV disappears from iTunes very quickly, though usually I can finish watching the show, occasionally I will need to re start mid show. I am getting very tired of this. I called Apple and spoke to 2 people about this and they both acted as though I were the first person to ever raise this issue. I will buy some cables as there doesn't seem to be any solution.
 
WOW! This seems to be a crazy, long time problem; and so random across machines/software that no few specific solution could solve it. I'm glad I found this thread. I'm not sure when I started experiencing this problem of AirPort keeps disconnecting, which I have to restart it to regain internet connection. I originally thought it was my router's problem, then realized it was not because my roommates don't have it at the same time with their PC. I've had this MacBook with Leopard since late 2007, and I'd assume this issue was not that big until recently when I got extremely frustrated and had to search the forum for solutions. I guess this is one of those ultimate failure Apple doesn't come up with any help. Hope my problem will be solved by some random update or whatever soon. I completely understand the frustration every unlucky ones have here... Good luck to all of us! :mad::confused:
 
i've just got new imac and having this problem with the wireless dropping. It is replacing my older macbook which had none of these problems yet they are both up to date. My new iMac also seems to have much slower download speeds.
I tried changing the channel on my access point and nothing!

Any suggestions??
 
I have a suggestion. Works for me. Use the Kismac app to list other wireless net are active. So, change your wireless channel to be different of the others.
 
Problems with 10.5.6

After trying some of the fixes on here I still only get sporadic internet access and can't download torrents. They never resolve. I re-boot into Tiger and it's problem solved. I won't be able to move to Leopard full-time till I can use ALL internet apps successfully.

I'm using Tomato Torrent but I don't suppose that makes any difference.

I've replaced IO80211family.kext with the one from the 10.5.2 updater as some people recommend this

I've created a new Location with manually entered details

I've added the 2 DNS servers that were recommended

I've turned off IPV6

Nothing has helped.
 
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