WiFi: Now You See Me, Now You Don't
Saturday, June 14, 2008
I use a Mac Book Pro as my main computer, as I travel around a fair bit. Because it's a laptop, I take advantage of the wireless at my office and my home. I use WPA at my home on a Netgear ProSafe WiFi router, and everything was peachy for a month or so. Then when I spent a week at a remote location, using their Siemens WiFi router in a closed WEP network, I started to get a lot of "Connection Timeout" errors from the airport connection. Additionally, the MBP seemed to refuse to reconnect to the closed network every time I wake it up - I would have to re-enter all those settings. Now, I'm running 10.5.2 (latest OS), so I can't update any further! Thinking it was just a compatability problem with the MBP / Siemens equipment, I thought it would be all good when I returned home. Not so - Connection Timeouts again. It got to the point where I was unable to connect to the WiFi at all.
The solution? Change the channel of the WiFi on the router. I fixed it to channel 10 and it works fine now. It must have something to do with the way the MBP deals with interference.
The solution? Change the channel of the WiFi on the router. I fixed it to channel 10 and it works fine now. It must have something to do with the way the MBP deals with interference.



