Mac Forum / General / Networking / May 2006

I run a local network composed of an Airport Extreme and an Airport
Express associated in WDS, and a dozen machines coming and going daily.
We recently added a Macbook pro which behaved poorly from the start,
with e. g. much longer pings than everyone else.

By analyzing the stations' journals with the Airport Management Utility
I discovered that contrary to all other machines the MBP at times did
series of associations, one every 20s or so, for hours!

I then turned on the "interference robustness" setting, and the positive
result was this ceaseless reassociating ended. It now seems, at least,
that the MBP manages to 'stay logged'.

But the issue is not over! the MBP throughput and ping values are still
extremely bad, and indeed by reusing the Airport Management Utility,
this time on the Monitor panel, I can see that everyone sends and gets
thousands of packets with no errors, while the MBP permanently sends
some 100 erroneous packets for a single good one (and the received
packets ratio is the same). This is very striking, all the most when
compared to all other machines (including a 'fossil' Titanium powerbook
that connects in 802.11.b).

I suspected an antenna issue, and located the MBP physically against
both stations: on the monitor I can see the received level boost up by
dozens of dB, but the packet error ratio stays exactly the same.

Does someone around understands what's happening?

What may I do?

Contrary to most of our macs, I don't know at all where in the MBP is
located the wifi card, nor if this is user-serviceable or even
visible...

TIA!

Hervé S.

P. S.
1) both stations run the latest versions of their software, and all
relevant machines are under 10.4.6
2) I posted a similar question one week ago in the Apple discussion
groups, but only got the confirmation my issue was duplicated by various
other persons, and one mentioned having read somewhere that installing
some of the Mac mini's AirPort drivers may overcome the issue, but no
one was able to find details...