From the WTF department, comes a tale about a guy who has been plagued by random, über-slow WiFi connections. Although the dropouts have temporarily gone away, after an educational discussion with a friend and a bit of command-line tinkering, I decided to call in the big guns that are John and Dave. Here’s the email I submitted to the Mac Geek Gab gurus:
I thought you would enjoy helping me figure out this silliness, as it registers pretty high on the geek-o-meter.
The scoop:
I have been plagued by [seemingly random] Wifi reliability issues over the past several months. In a nutshell, my WiFi (AEBS WPA2 Personal) bandwidth slows to a crawl (0.1-0.5 KB/s) during up/downloads. Many web pages will produce a “timeout” error in Firefox, others will not even load (server cannot be found). After some time (several/tens of minutes) I regain full bandwidth (3 Mb/1 Mb), stop my cursing, and move on. This has been happening more and more as of late on all devices: 2 MacBooks and 2 iPhones.
Troubleshooting:
In true, MGG-fashion I have gone through several troubleshooting steps and here’s what I know:
- Problem still occurs when swapping out the AEBS for a Linksys WRT54G (WPA2 Personal)
- Problem still occurs when resetting my ISP’s cable modem and AEBS/Linksys routers
- Problem still occurs regardless of the web browser
- Problem still occurs when swapping DNS name servers between OpenDNS and those of my ISP
- Problem still occurs when setting the MTU to 1492
- Problem DOES NOT occur when connecting the 2 MacBooks via wired ethernet
- Problem DOES NOT occur when disabling WiFi encryption (aha!) and running it open (scary!)
- Problem RETURNS when enabling WiFi encryption (WPA2 Personal)
Prognosis:
After a lengthy discussion with a friend, we believe the issue might be related to the MTU and possible packet throttling by my ISP. I use a 16-character password for WPA2 Personal WiFi encryption. Is it possible that packets are being dropped because I’m using a relatively large character string for my WiFi encryption? I am currently testing things after resetting my password to an 8-character string. I don’t even want to think about the possibility of enabling WEP.
Any thoughts? What in the helicopter in going on here? Love the show.
What did I do? I turned off WPA2, opened up the network with no encryption, then enabled WPA2 encryption again. If anyone knows WTF is going on, for the love of all things holy, feel free to post a comment.
Follow-up article Dual-band Wifi Hotness
3-Apr, 2009 at 7:22 am
[...] recently wrote a post describing my Wifi network woes. I was giddy as a schoolboy happy to hear that my conundrum was read and batted about on the Mac [...]
28-Sep, 2009 at 1:32 am
Did you try changing the network channels?
28-Sep, 2009 at 8:10 pm
Yep! Changing the channel to “1″ and improving the quality of my cable connection did the trick.