That Danny!
The problem with wifi after the upgrade
When I upgraded my imac to the new OS X Lion, everything seemed fine initially, until I realised there was a problem with the wifi connection that didn’t exist before the upgrade. The connection to the wifi router was dropping on a regular basis, and a quick search showed that I wasn’t alone. This seems to be a bug in OS X that’s affecting quite a few others. Some suggested it was to do with the SMC or the wifi channel. Some suggested you remove the settings file, and one theory was that the connection was dropping because of IPv6 preferences in the Network settings of the wifi connection.
The theory
When looking into this I noticed that my wifi connection was always fine when I was using my Mac. It is during latency times that it would disconnect. Typically, I would leave my Mac for a while, come back – and suddenly the connection was lost. My theory was therefore that somehow the latency was causing the problem. The question was: was it the latency in the iMac itself or just latency in using wifi? If it was just wifi, could I solve the problem by simply pinging the network regularly?
The solution
At first, I didn’t think my theory made sense, because the iMac’s email program pings external servers regularly. I then realised that this is at one minute intervals, so reasoned that maybe that minute is long enough for there to be a latency causing a disconnect. When I work on my Mac, I regularly stream Internet radio, so there’s no cause for the connection to drop. I was, however, in the habit of closing down most applications before leaving my machine, so any apps that might have sustained the wifi connection would have been closed.
So, I started to leave my Twitter App (with two accounts) and my RSS app (GRUML), on and open while I’m away, which is in addition to email and a few other small programs that keep the wifi connection pinged.
In the week since I’ve started doing this I’ve had no wifi connection drops, and so far it’s holding (if you’re seeing this post, then I’m still OK).
I hope this helps you too. Please let me know if it does by leaving a comment, to help others.
Good luck!
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
Thanks for this. It’s the first solution that worked for me, after days of trying.
This is the only solution that seems to be working, thank you!!!