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Wi-Fi Issues Continue For OS X Users Despite Updates

Posted by Soulskill on from the no-motivation-to-fix dept.

itwbennett writes: Although Apple has never officially acknowledged issues surrounding Yosemite and Wi-Fi connectivity, the company is clearly aware of the problem: Leading off the improvements offered in the update 10.10.2 update released Tuesday was 'resolves an issue that might cause Wi-Fi to disconnect,' according to the release notes. Despite this, Apple's support forum was filled with tales of frustrated users. And Mac owners aren't the only Apple users experiencing wireless connection failures after updating their OS. Wi-Fi connectivity issues have also dogged iOS 8 since Apple released the mobile OS on Sept. 17.

23 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No shit by Grishnakh · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I wonder if these are Broadcom chips, with the driver code actually being supplied by Broadcom. Broadcom drivers are shit.

  2. Probably just holding it wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Users are probably just holding their device incorrectly,

    Captcha: Posture

    1. Re:Probably just holding it wrong by mspohr · · Score: 2

      My Macbook Air 2010 worked fine with wifi until I "upgraded" to Yosemite... since then very flaky wifi... spontaneous disconnects, only connects on wake about half the time. I've tried a lot of the "fixes" on the forums and still have problems. Most of the time I have to reboot to get it to connect reliably (until it goes to sleep).
      Yosemite also features a crappy UI and Spotlight has lost much of its usefulness. Apple's software is going down hill fast. No more "upgrades" for me.

      --
      I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
  3. in an unrelated news event by nimbius · · Score: 4, Funny

    thousands of coffee shops around the world were suddenly faced with a mysterious plunge in their electricity bill. Further componding the paradox was a sudden increase in customers willing to pay actual money for some foreign substance known as 'coffee.' Dusting off a curious relic called the 'espresso' machine one employee states, "according to the machine manual im called 'a barista', and this device makes something called espresso?" Puzzled, a cashier chimed in, "no thats not right, we're an ISP you know, like Comcast...thats what we sell isnt it?" Still curious, a manager emerged and asked, "how long have we sold this? its called a biscotti! does anyone remember these?" A customer interviewed expressed marvel in finding that, "This is a coffee shop now! just 3 months ago i think it was an office. everyone had laptops. I guess they moved?"

    --
    Good people go to bed earlier.
    1. Re:in an unrelated news event by d34thm0nk3y · · Score: 2

      its called a biscotti! does anyone remember these?"

      Have Mike throw them out. They've all gone hard.

  4. Re:No issues here by oodaloop · · Score: 5, Funny

    I guess Apple can close the trouble ticket now. Thanks!

    --
    Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
  5. Re:Anecdotal Example by SuperKendall · · Score: 2

    Not that it should be needed, but you can buy an Thunderbolt to Ethernet adaptor... I bought one just in case as you never know when traveling what networking will be like.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  6. Re:No shit by Grishnakh · · Score: 3, Informative

    I've worked with the Broadcom driver source code; it's crap. It doesn't surprise me they're having problems. What's funny is (now that I think about it and remember this from a prior job) Apple is easily Broadcom's biggest wifi customer; you'd think they could do a better job with their software for them, but apparently not.

  7. much better than before either way by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    the "broken" state was actually a fix for a much more broken state... unless you want your laptop battery constantly drained while in sleep mode, the wifi antennae is turned off... when you wake up the computer, it used to just assume it was still connected and send out a "hey, i think i'm connected to you" message, which your wifi router would happily acknowledge, and the connection would be instantly available as if the computer never went to sleep. no new logon or auth handshake, just instant access, which is what most users want.... but that opens up rogue wifi hotspots from catching that "hey, i think i'm connected to you" message, and responding with their own "yup, that's me, we're connected" on a slightly more powerful signal which would always beat out the response from the real router, and now you can sniff all of their traffic and steal session cookies. classic airport or coffee shop hack.

    so, the "fix" is to require a new auth handshake whenever recovering from sleep mode. that is a good thing. for me, it means i open my laptop and get a "the internet is not available" error if i immediately refresh a web page... but the connection automatically reconnects within about 5 seconds.... that is the kind of thing steve jobs wouldn't have let ship... but the alternative is a massive security hole.

  8. "Wi-Fi" is fundamentally broken, period. by allquixotic · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The problems with "Wi-Fi" are numerous. The end result is that generally speaking, Wi-Fi is a hot mess of broken tech that doesn't work. In the rare case that it DOES work, even the most trivial of changes in the environment or in the client can completely break it.

    1. Early versions of the spec were too loosely worded, and allowed for too many "interpretations".

    2. Vendor extensions are still a major problem. Many vendor extensions are not compatible with one another, and a device that has a vendor extension enabled
    may work very poorly (or not at all) with a device lacking said extension.

    3. Actual implementations of Wi-Fi are all over the map in terms of quality, with ridiculous things like: advertising support for an extension that it doesn't actually support; criminally severe bugs in a production implementation; vendors that try to work around bugs that other vendors introduced but in turn create yet more bugs, causing a vicious cycle of workarounds to workarounds; "hide and go seek" with extensions and spec interpretations; ridiculous driver implementations that hold exclusive access over very coarse-grained locks in the OS kernel for long periods of time, causing freezes and/or panics; poorly designed antennas; buggy firmware that never gets updated; etc.

    4. The spectrum WiFi uses is open to be used by literally anything else that complies with a few simple rules, such as the maximum Tx power on that frequency band. As a consequence, random electric devices can freely leak a certain amount of random interference (noise) in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz WiFi bands, which destroys the ability for WiFi to operate. Ever lose your WiFi when you turn on your vacuum cleaner, or microwave? That's what's happening.

    5. The spectrum WiFi uses is used by other communications protocols that are not Wi-Fi. While some effort is made to interoperate between a few of them, such as cooperation between Bluetooth nodes and WiFi nodes (such that they don't "trample over" one another if they use the same frequency), the interoperation protocols, specifications, and implementations have the same problems as the Wi-Fi specs themselves, as stated above.

    6. Recent increased focus on power saving has caused some rather extreme power saving techniques to be employed in Wi-Fi firmware and drivers, which sacrifices performance, range and reliability for a few microwatts or milliwatts of energy. Paradoxically, some of the proponents of these techniques actually think that's OK, and are still trying to make the problem worse.

    7. There are a large number of complex physical parameters that affect whether two WiFi transceivers will be able to communicate, which 99% of users don't understand at all. The power saving techniques mentioned above reduce the variety of possible configurations (that is, device orientations and distances, mainly) under which the signal will be reliable and high-performance.

    8. Vendors that produce Wi-Fi transceivers, or products that integrate them, usually perform inadequate testing to certify the device as interoperable with a very large array of existing and upcoming other products that use Wi-Fi. Especially in the case of smartphones, the possible number of clients and basestations that may be interacted with is tremendous: Smart TVs; DSL modem/routers; cable modem/routers; other smartphones; enterprise APs and repeaters; laptops; tablets; cars; IoT devices -- all these things need to be tested. With a LOT of work -- and I mean a LOT -- eventually a Wi-Fi stack can be designed in such a way that it operates at least decently well with all modern incarnations of the above, but that says nothing about older implementations, which people love to keep around for a decade or more, and expect them to work. A sufficiently general Wi-Fi stack that works okay with all of the above will probably have so many heuristics for bug detection, compromises, polling tests, etc. that they won't work especially well even in an "ideal" scenario, and may even try to implement contradictory rul

    1. Re:"Wi-Fi" is fundamentally broken, period. by swb · · Score: 2

      I would add:

      9. Entities like cities rolling out "city-wide" Wi-Fi and filling the available spectrum with background noise which reduces performance of local Wi-Fi.

      10. Organizations that treat Wi-Fi spectrum as something they "own" within a multi-tenant building and making attempts to kill off uses they don't control or profit from.

    2. Re:"Wi-Fi" is fundamentally broken, period. by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The problems with "Wi-Fi" are numerous. The end result is that generally speaking, Wi-Fi is a hot mess of broken tech that doesn't work.

      Oddly, I find Wi-Fi to be the only wireless technology which does work reliably. Bluetooth? It's pure bollocks, it never works. Well, that is, when you're trying to do anything the least bit fiddly. And they permitted all kinds of things which abuse the shit out of the spec to call themselves bluetooth, like PS3 controllers. And my problems with cellular technology are legion. But Wi-Fi tends to just keep on ticking along for me. Routers, those shit themselves, but completely and not just the Wi-Fi.

      Actual implementations of Wi-Fi are all over the map in terms of quality, with ridiculous things like: advertising support for an extension that it doesn't actually support; criminally severe bugs in a production implementation; vendors that try to work around bugs that other vendors introduced but in turn create yet more bugs, causing a vicious cycle of workarounds to workarounds; "hide and go seek" with extensions and spec interpretations; ridiculous driver implementations that hold exclusive access over very coarse-grained locks in the OS kernel for long periods of time, causing freezes and/or panics; poorly designed antennas; buggy firmware that never gets updated; etc.

      You can have all the same equivalent problems with normal Ethernet, though. Many vendors still sell ordinary 100bTX(etc) chipsets which are total garbage, and people still buy NICs using them and stick them into their machines. I have a whole raft of sketchy tulip clones here because they were $1/ea some years ago at Fry's, back when that was still a really amazing price and not just what you'd expect on eBay. They work OK if you only put one of them in a system, which pretty much crapped on my plans for them, but over the years they've occasionally come in handy. Problem is, PCI is goin' away...

      The spectrum WiFi uses is open to be used by literally anything else that complies with a few simple rules, [...] Ever lose your WiFi when you turn on your vacuum cleaner, or microwave? That's what's happening.

      Well no. My vacuum and microwave are both brand-name products which seem to have adequate shielding, they do not seem to negatively impact my 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi in the least. In case you're wondering, the vac is a Dyson.

      If USB and its "device class" specifications (Mass Storage, Battery charging spec, RNDIS, audio class, etc.) is a ringing success story of how standardization can promote interoperability,

      It isn't. Most devices don't use the generic driver, even when it would be better than whatever they actually did.

      What sucks about Wi-Fi is that when you have a lot of networks near one another, they crap on one another harder than they are supposed to. It takes extra-special care to make this not happen, and then any dillhole who brings his own battery-powered AP with him can still totally hose your network. But otherwise it mostly works, and often better than the other stuff that's supposed to be better. I had way less radio-related problems when my WISP used Wi-Fi than I do now that they're using some custom CDMA crap. No weather problems either, even though I'm more than five miles from the site. It proves nothing of course, except that the Wi-Fi is more mature technology than whatever they were using.

      Now, I have yet to try Chromecast, Miracast etc. but I'm starting to think harder about that, so maybe I will finally learn to hate Wi-Fi. But in general, the only real hardship I've had is with chipsets whose drivers don't support master mode under Linux. This taught me to buy intel and Atheros. Even then you don't get a guarantee, but odds are great and you can always check ahead of time. The thing is, that's good advice anyway, both what to buy and what to do before you buy.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    3. Re:"Wi-Fi" is fundamentally broken, period. by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Excuses, excuses. I don't want to call you a fanboy, but this is a classic fanboy tactic. Blame the technology, make out it is so badly broken it's the technology's fault and not Apple's.

      The reality is that hundreds of millions of people use wifi successfully and with minimal hassle every day. Yeah, it's not perfect but 20 years ago widespread low cost networking was just a dream, and now we have thousands and thousands of devices sharing the 2.4GHz band more or less without issue. If anything it's biggest problem is that it's too popular and has saturated 2.4GHz.

      To look at it another way, all other major operating systems managed to implement it in a fairly reliable way. I come home, my phone and laptop connect to wifi automatically and just work, despite the congestion and mix of standards and vendors.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    4. Re:"Wi-Fi" is fundamentally broken, period. by skids · · Score: 2

      On top of all this, Apple WiFi is especially broken because:

      1) The station will never hop to the best AP when it should, it always waits until signal drops to -75dBm before roaming, so it continues to use the AP at the door where you walked in the building,. not the one near where you are sitting, ruining WiFi for everyone with low-rate shouting. Apple thinks we are going to carefully tweak our networks around this weakness (this is their stated offcial position on the matter) and they are wrong.

      2) Responding to a bluetooth beacon from various Apple gadgets, the Apples will try to subvert the local WiFi network and communicate directly on channel 149. They won't even try the local network first to see if it is usable, instead they will try to multiplex the radio hardware between 149 and whatever other channel is actually being used. Meanwhile they fire up a radio on chanel 149, which is a common primary channel for bonded 40/80 channel groups, no matter what else is around trying to use it. Apple thinks we are going to hobble our 40MHz/non-DFS and 80Mhz/DFS channel bonding plan by taking all the APs off 149 (also their official position.) They are wrong.

      3) Apple cannot manage to get their autodiscovery protocols to shut up long enough to let wifi and bluetooth hardware settle into a usable state. They think having their devices constantly scanning for gadgets is a terrific idea. They are wrong.

      4) Apple keeps removing control over the WiFi from the users, preventing them from properly configuring their chipsets for a particular network, or even locking to a specific AP or turn off a band to help network admins troubleshoot a problem. Every new version of the OS, more options for control of the WiFi disappear from the UI. They think every network operator is going to provide .mobileconfig files to set these options. They are wrong.

      5) For years, Apple has stubbornly refused to implement and support OKC. They think that because their iPads now support 11k this is no longer a problem and we will all just enable 11k even though it will break a bunch of other legacy devices (including iPads too old to run 11k) which still account for a large percentage of our users. They are wrong. And also they won't say whether they ever plan to support 11k on the OSX side.

      --
      Someone had to do it.
  9. Bonjour over AWDL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    This issue: Bonjour over AWDL is still happening on 10.10.2. Wifi download speeds immediately plummet when any service that relies on bonjour activates. You can reproduce this issue by starting a speed test of your choice and clicking anything that requires bonjour. The speed will fall like a rock.

    Issuing a:
    sudo ifconfig awdl0 down

    will immediately restore the connection speed. It's so certain that I've been able to basically play ping pong with the DL speeds by clicking the AirPlay icon to cause it to dive and then dropping the awdl0 connection to bounce it back up. There's also a lingering disconnect problem that seems to infect Apple devices trying to connect or remain connected to WPA 2 (AES) networks although I've not seen this behavior since 10.10.2 arrived, although my testing has been limited.

  10. Same on iOS 7 by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 3, Interesting

    My iPad 2, running iOS 7 gets disconnected in certain WIFIs quite often.
    My iPhone running iOS 6 stays in the same network without any problems.
    Since Mac OS X 10.5/10.6 and iOS 5/6, more precisely since roughly half a year, perhaps a year, before Steve Jobs death, the quality and usefulness of Apple Software goes downhill rapidly ... 10.7 does not even offer a hotkey or a menu to switch desktops. And how to activate multiple desktops, you need to google for. I guess a huge amount of people who never had 10.6 don't even know that 10.7 and later supports multiple (virtual) desktops.
    Support for AppleScript, for Apples own programs, like TextEdit, is down to a bare minimum ... you can not even insert a clickable link into a text document via the applications API (not sure if that ever worked, though).
    My Application lost the ability to search a few days ago, also the intelligent folders (which I rely heavily on in my business) stopped working. A restart of Mail.app changed nothing. I had to reboot.
    Backups to time machine, don't work minimum once a week. Error is: (insert computer name) bundle in use. I wonder by whom? Usually I have to reboot the time machine, which you only can do by unplugging it from the power: which is a bad idea for a device/appliance containing a hard drive. (This is all 10.7 on a MacBook Air)
    The back ups for my other laptop, running 10.6 got lost half a year ago. Timemachine gave an error: incremental back up not possible, need to make a full backup. Wow, never had I assumed that implies all my old backups are gone.
    I could rant for ever ...
    MS I mainly hated because the UI is not useable, and the random bugs that showed up REGULARLY.
    Now I start hating Apple, too. At least the UI still works better (for me) than Windows.
    Probably it is time to build up my own unix based backup solution and write my own apps for basic stuff like Mail and Web. I can not get it that it is still impossible to freeze a browser tab that is in the background completely ...
    A few tabs open in Chrome and Safari and the laptop just runs 3h instead of the 'normal' 10h.

    --
    Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
  11. Re:No shit by xeoron · · Score: 4, Informative

    I found resetting the NVRAM fixing the problem. The process: 1) Shut down your Mac. 2) Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option, P, and R. 3) Turn on your Mac. 4) Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys immediately after you hear the startup sound. 5) Hold these keys until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for a second time. 6) Release the keys.

  12. Re:Anecdotal Example by epyT-R · · Score: 2

    They should include ethernet ports right into the machine like they used to. Fuck this ultra thin shit..

  13. Re:No shit by Jesus_666 · · Score: 2, Funny

    I just tried that and imagine my surprise when my MBP spontaneously downgraded itself to Mountain Lion!

    Okay, actually it just booted into the old Mountain Lion volume on the first HDD because the Mac keeps the preferred boot volume in NVRAM. So when clearing your NVRAM keep in mind that the Mac will boot into whatever system volume it finds first unless you tell it otherwise.

    --
    USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
  14. Re:No shit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    This must be that part of 'Apple just works' stuff I read about.

  15. Re:Anecdotal Example by dgatwood · · Score: 2

    Would be nice. I also wish they'd go back to the pre-retina enclosure, and instead of wasting space on an optical drive, I'd like to see them use most of that extra space for additional battery capacity. If I run Photoshop or Finale or Xcode or any of the other software that I use to actually get stuff done with my retina MBP (about one year old), I'm lucky to get 2.5 to 3.5 hours out of it. If I were designing a computer to meet my needs, the "four cores running at full tilt" duration would be eight or ten hours, and the "just wasting time doing light-duty web browsing" number would be measured in days.

    Or just bring back removable batteries. Either way.

    --

    Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

  16. Re:No shit by AaronW · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Several years ago I worked at Atheros working on improving their Linux driver performance for wireless access points. One of my tasks was to figure out why OS X was quite a bit faster than Linux and Windows. I tracked it down to the way OSX sends TCP ACK packets. Both Linux and Windows send a TCP ACK after every other packet whereas OS X would start to space the ACKs out if the connection was reliable. This had a significant impact with 802.11N where there is a lot of packet aggregation. I discovered that OS X would start spacing the ACKs out to every 16-32 TCP packets instead of every other packet. I wish Linux would do something similar.

    I can't comment on any other drivers or current OS X since this was a bit over four years ago.

    I can think of a couple of things that would improve Linux for wireless. First of all, spacing out the ACKs like OS X would help. Second of all, supporting transmitting a group of packets at a time, especially to a particular destination, would help a lot. This is due to the way 802.11N aggregates a lot of packets together into a single wireless packet based on the next wireless hop destination. It's much more efficient for cache utilization and for the code paths when groups of packets are handled rather than individual packets since there is a lot of queueing and dequeeuing going on inside the driver.

    --
    This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
  17. Re: No shit by Migity · · Score: 2

    Sounds like Nagle's algotrithm has popped it's head up again. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki...