“OS X Mountain Lion has been a painless upgrade for most users, but there are a fair amount of people experiencing some unusual wireless connectivity problems and issues,” OS X Daily reports. “Mainly, the wi-fi connection seems to drop at random, or the Mac simply won’t stay connected to a wireless network for long. Sometimes it automatically reconnects and sometimes it doesn’t.”
“If you’re experiencing these wifi issues you’re not alone, the good news is that we have a few solutions that appear to resolve the connection problems in Mountain Lion,” OS X Daily reports. “For best results, try combining both of these tips.”
Fixing OS X Mountain Lion wireless connection issues:
#1: Add a New Network Location & Renew DHCP
#2: Change MTU Size to Prevent Dropped Connections
Complete instructions in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Are you experiencing wireless connection issues with OS X Mountain Lion? If so, did either or both of the fixes above correct your issue(s)? Or do you have another fix you’d like to share? Let us know below!
Zero issues.
Zero issues. Mountain Lion is running flawlessly.
Adding a new network location will generally fix the issue.
Lion does it on one of my MBPs
Indeed on both my MBP 15 RD and MBA 13. I adjusted the MTU on my Cisco Router to 1850 in lieu of 1500 and of course changed channel and so far things have stabilized.
Changing channels is an indication of channel conflict, i.e. interference. It has nothing to do with wireless stability, or potential lack of, inherent in Mountain Lion.
When they say “adjust the MTU” they mean down…not up.
Never increase it higher than 1500…never.
Adjusted it to 1492…or lower…1360, or even down to 1200 if you connect through VPN’s.(VPN clients should do this for you)
It is better to send two packets than to try and sen one that gets split into two anyway.
Good luck networking…
I use OSX 10.7.4 and have this very same problem and have found the only solution is to disconnect the router, modem, airport and cable provider, wait…….hook everything back up and try again. Sometimes this works, sometimes it does not.
yes. intermittent issues. have to stop/start wifi. went back to ethernet
Same here. Just half an hour ago I had to turn off WiFi and turn it back on MBP Retina with 10.8. Fixed the problem for me.
No issue whatsoever. I have two machines running ML and both connect and stay connected. Off topic but my new MPB retina is blindingly fast. I was stunned at how quickly it installed ML after the download. Likewise, when I installed copies of stuff I bought from the App Store, the machine just flew through the installations. My local ISP treats most of its clients demands for bandwidth like a flight of Watermelons as seen from the other side of a sphincter but once past that limitation, the machine itself just flies.
Zero problems on 3 systems.
No issues on a 2010 MacBook Air and 2012 MacBook Air.
this popped up again?
it’s been going on for a long time now… all the way back to 10.6.8 if you read the discussions.
so many “fixes” that don’t last either.
YMMV most don’t have issues, some do. some are able to fix it long term, others still have intermittent issues with WiFi connections. (Yet if they bootcamp to windows… works 100%, so we know it’s drivers/apple)
Never had an issue.
I had this issue before in Lion. Loosing every two or three minutes my wireless connection at home. It happens only with a Arris Router from my Internet and IP telephone service provider.
What I did was follow Mr. Sommefeldt’s instructions, which “basically” is to replace the Artheros Wireless chips drivers with the ones from Snow Leopard. This also works for ML. Its just a script run in terminal.
My equipment is a “Mid 2009” MacBook Pro, the problematic Router is a Arris Touchstone® WTM552
Link
http://rys.sommefeldt.com/2011/09/04/osx-lion-wifi.html
I had to do the same with my iMac when it hit me. It didn’t work for me.
as did most of the suggestions, all the suggestions from the apple discussions some worked for some people, some didn’t work at all.
An Apple tech even had a bunch of us run scripts and send the results to them.. no luck.
I disabled WiFi, deleted all connections and plugged in a ethernet cable. and after a week, unplugged and reconnected to WiFi. 90% of my issues were gone.
a few months later, an Airport update came out and ever since then I have had only a handful of problems with WiFi.
One thing people figured out, WPA2 was/is part of the problem. If you are having connection problems, disable WPA2 and see if it goes away. Some switched to WAP and all was fine also. It slowed the connection speed down by going that route though.. but it “cured” the stability. (which made people think it had/has something to do with the WPA2 protocol and OS X)
And before anyone jumps in and says they are fine and don’t believe the “issue”.. It is rare. Read the apple discussions about it, it does exist but it isn’t common at all.
And anyone that does end up with the issue… I feel for you. I had it for months (started when I updated to 10.6.8 and all the way through 10.7.1-2 or so) I’m fine now with the occasional hiccup, (Probably every 2 months maybe) Start/stop WiFi cures it and I’m back in 30 seconds.
Perfect! Thank you so much, FTB! Last week my iMac was in for almost a week of AppleCare repair. They never could find the problem, so they changed out the whole wifi card. When I came back home, the iMac worked fine for 3 days. Then the connection problem started again. So I found your advice, and switched my router from mixed mode to WPA only. My iMac wireless performance then returned to normal! Before that, with mixed mode WPA/WPA2, it had degraded to about 10% of normal. I have several older Macs on the wireless network, so perhaps the network was actually running in mixed mode and maybe that’s why the problem is so rare and obscure, if it only shows up in a truly mixed operating configuration?
P.S. Then I switched to WPA2 (AES) only, which is supposed to be somewhat more secure, and so far that’s also running perfectly, with my newest (Intel Core i7) and oldest (G4 & G5) Macs on my network. So (at this point) it appears that the problem comes from using mixed mode.
Have this issue on two recent MBP’s. Will try the fixes.
No issues with 3 systems, Mac Pro, Mac Mini and a iMac.
I wasn’t even aware Apple had issues with OSX 10.8 until this piece.
Interesting.
Having an issue with the email exchange server updating automatically and then not working. I have to change the server back manually every few minutes to keep the exchange going.
Mail still has absurd little formatting possibilities and is does not work with Exchange. Mail is so good it figures out the Exchange server address and if it gets it wrong, there is no way to alter it. Well, you can, but only until you next launch Mail….then all the settings are back to what Mail thinks they should be…..
I do a lot of tech support and I always find if u switch from wpa/wpa2 to a pure and wpa2 connection it clears up
My 2 cents
After upgrading to Mountain Lion on my Retina MBP I had wifi issues wherein the computer would not connect after coming out of sleep. Curiously, my mid 2010 MBP didn’t have the problem and I migrated the settings from that MBP to my new MBP. My MBA doesn’t have the problem either.
But I digress… I repaired the issue by going to Keychain access. Within “Login” I found multiple instances of my network. I deleted all of them and then went to “System” in Keychain access and deleted all I found there.
Upon restart, I was prompted to join a network, I joined my network and I’m happy to say that my Retina MBP has worked great!
I have had wifi issues on my macbook pro with snow leopard ,lion and now with mountain lion as well. It’s a little different with mountain lion. It shows that i am connected but no web pages will load. If i turn wifi off and back on then it starts to work. Sometimes i have to do it a few times.And then other times i lose the connection completely. But when i lose wifi on my macbook pro my ipad still works and as soon as i load a web page on the ipad the connection to my macbook pro comes back. I will try these fixes but ive tried a lot of “fixes” that didn’t work so im not too confident.
So far so good. I think it worked.
MDN says: Are you experiencing wireless connection issues with OS X Mountain Lion? If so, did either or both of the fixes above correct your issue(s)? Or do you have another fix you’d like to share? Let us know below!
As a beta-tester of 10.8, I can tell you that Apple were a bit late to update their networking tech. There was a transition point where networking in general went haywire. The solution was simple: START FROM SCRATCH.
IOW: I believe 10.8 doesn’t handle certain pre-existing 10.7.x network settings very well. If you reset them all and create the settings again, I suspect you’ll discover that everything works just fine. That was certainly my experience.
Now, if only network settings were easy. Apple has improved network user-friendliness considerably. But networking remains extremely geek level by nature. I’d head over to the Apple Discussions area if you’d like some assistance for free, or drop on by to chat with a Mac Genius at an Apple store.
For newbies: MTU = Maximum Transmission Unit. Here is an article on the subject:
Maximum transmission unit @Wikipedia
If your MTU is set at too large a size, stalled web page downloads is one typical side-effect. There are utilities, such as Cocktail and Mountain Lion Cache Cleaner, that allow you to alter your system’s MTU without adequately explaining the consequences. I personally suggest you turn such settings OFF in these utilities and let Mac OS X handle it ‘Automatically’ for you, be it for Ethernet or Wi-Fi, as described in this document:
OS X Mountain Lion: Use Gigabit Ethernet @Apple
Thanks for advice . I tried that and it seems it helps so far!
Tried these to no avail. It says im connected but nothing loads. Got a new modem too, but still dropping and timing out, no dns servers and everything! This is messed up!
I have same issue even with the changed settings of MTU, location and a fresh clean installation of ML on my retina MBP. have an older MacBook Pro also with no issues, the same goes for iPhone iPad and 2 windows PC. think there is a need for a driver fix or even worse, recall of hardware.
Tried to respond a few times but my internet kept disconnecting. Its driving me nuts with Mountain Lion. Have tried everything and it still drops the signal. My PC laptop retains its signal 100% of the time.
Hi guys, I had this problem too and I had tried everything but nothing worked for me so i decided to find out what’s wrong with this SOAB xD. What i did was… i went to router configuration setting and changed some settings under wifi setting. (it worked for me)
First of all make sure you’re using a WPA2, for WPA-type use Phssphrase and chose your password. But make sure there are no numbers in in your network password.
Second schange your channel. Before i had set it on channel 6 now i changed it on channel 11.
Also make sure your Encryption is set on AES.
i’m giving you also a picture of my Wifi-Settings down below.
Didn’t work for me. Still haveing troubles
Nothing helps me – ML still dropping WIFI connection ‘Network settings’ or ‘ISP’. Temporary fix with diagnostics. No fix with ‘network change or renew DHCP’ or with ‘MTU size change’. All temp fixes. Come on APPLE help us – Please