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Haven’t noticed this in the Northwest.

Have noticed that the wireless on my Mac Mini is particularly horrible and will only work with specific brands of access points.

For example, I can have my Linksys WRT54G sitting right on top of my mini or it will lose connectivity within the first 5 minutes of use.

If I use it with a Dlink it will maintain connection.

I know you guys are fond of Apple products. Perhaps a Mac flaw?

I moved from a suburban apartment (2 or 3 WiFi networks in range of my computer) to an urban one (15-20 WiFi networks in range of my computer), and I have definitely noticed a decrease in throughput.

WiFi is getting worse. I live in a high-density condo where sometimes I lose signal completely for some reason. I’ve given up on WiFi at home and gone to stretching cables to every room.

It’s faster, more reliable, and much more secure.

@Mel Gray, my wife’s powerbook won’t stay connected to my WRT54G either. Or at least it didn’t until I flashed it with DD-WRT mini.

Outside of that, haven’t had any issues. I’m in the burbs though so there’s not a lot of network overlap.

This is a big problem here in NYC as well. There are really only 3 channels in 802.11 1/6/11, if someone puts their AP on 8 that means they are stomping on both channel 6 and 11.

Fun times.

I would much prefer hotels to offer cabled ethernet internet than wi-fi… I find I use my cellular 3G modem from Verizon more than most wi-fi connections.

At home, however, I use AirPort extreme and my MacBook Pro has AWESOME speed and can even bring it into my friends apartment downstairs, and I still have almost full signal strength. I am in love with Wireless-N!

My wife and I were in Barcelona at the tail end of our honeymoon. Our hotel had WiFi on every floor, but somehow set up so they were all competing with one another (one router per floor or every other floor). Probably didn’t help we were in a dense urban area surrounded by other WiFi routers.

We could get online for about five minutes at most. Usually you were off within 30 seconds—your router would disappear and you’d have to connect to one of the 10-20 other live routers.

PS This was in October, and since it was our honeymoon it was NOT a big deal :-) To print our boarding passes for the flight home, we found an old fashioned Internet cafe. Of the three ones in our (two year old) Lonely Planet guide that we checked, two had shut.

I’ve had pretty bad luck with Apple Airports and Linksys APs in urban areas, but my Cisco Aironet 1231 has been rock solid (clients are a Macbook and Lenovo Thinkpad). It’s my unverified belief that Cisco APs are better at negotiating around traffic caused by neighboring networks.

They are much trickier to setup, but do have a web interface—thought it’s a little counter-intuitive sometimes. Of course if you known Cisco IOS , you’re golden.

I picked mine up used on eBay for cheap:

http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?satitle=Air-AP1231G-A-K9

Not sure if Cisco is quite there yet with 802.11n though.

Yes, it is. It degrades day by day. It’s an unresolved problem, someday everybody will move to 802.11a, and the problem will repeat at that band, and then the next…

Hopefully if you’re using a Mac you’re also using an Airport Extreme. With that said, you may wish to manually set which channel to use. Most of the cheaper routers will sit at channel 1 – if you set it yourself you may see better results.

The 2.4GHz range is going downhill fast, whereas the 5GHz range is still pretty good. I bought one of the new 802.11n Airport Extremes, and in 5Ghz n-only mode, I can do upwards of 15MB/second (faster than 100Mbit/s ethernet) over the air between it and a MacBook Pro.

If you’re having signal problems, switch to the 5GHz band. If that doesn’t work, go wired.

YES !! dammit.

No probs at home, even with at least 5 other base stations visible (several of which are not secured).

In coffee shops on the other hand… when it’s online at all it’s slow, but probably intentionally throttled.

802.11n over 5GHz is definitely the way to go. I get 90Mbps throughput between my MacBook Air and my Airport Extreme, and my old MacBook Pro would get about 160Mbps.

Weird. I have an 11g setup and I can see 18 (yes, 18) other access points from my NYC apartment, almost all of them in the same 2.4GHz band. It seems that most of my neighbors are on channel 6, so I picked one that’s less common and my network has been fast and rock solid for over a year. FYI , my desktops and laptops are Macs, my router is a Linksys WRT54G , and I’m running DD-WRT firmware.

The Signal vs Noise has definitely gotten worse… haha, I kid!

Yeah, we definitely need more channels (or better technology). 1, 6, and 11 are way too few. 802.11n seems to be better but adaptation is slow; one has to wonder once people move to ‘n’ that the problem will repeat itself…

All I know is the wireless at South by Southwest SUCKED !

My home wifi is better now that I’ve switched off all my b/g airports and went to just extreme (even though they were on different channels). A corollary to this in the public space is how bad PPTP VPNs are over WIFI – 2 years ago if I hit a public wifi network I could do VPN 90 % of the time, now its more like 40-50%. I keep wondering if we are all dealing with the 10 trillion WRT54gs that have been installed by owners of coffee shops, bars, libraries, tatoo parlors, etc, and have never done a firmware update – “What the heck is firmware???”. My best VPN is now using AT&Ts data network with my iphone….

Have you tried changing your WiFi channel...?

Definitely a problem here too. In an apartment block with around 15 access points visible at any point in time. Although it’s taking a month to get re-connected now that I’ve moved, so I’d be grateful for anything atm!

Oh yeah, it’s very congested where I live. Lots of networks fighting for the airwaves. There’s new trend too where people are using abusive names to call their networks. Why?

I live in the countryside in the UK, so not too bad. Only a few of my neighbors have wifi!

We have had to change the channel a few times to keep it going good. We used airsnort on a linux box and picked a channel that was at least two away from the others. With only something like 11 channels, it’s getting hard.

It’s quite congested at my apartment on the south side of Chicago. Even with DD-WRT auto-channel feature and tweaks galore, I still drop at least once a day. When I run a WiFi scanner, I see a dozen networks within the first 10 seconds and will capture a dozen more if I leave it run for a few minutes.

In a word, my wifi is terrible. I’d love to pull the trigger on a Time Capsule (still think that’s a dumb name), but I’m afraid it’ll be just as flakey as any other router.

I just got a new work laptop and the reception isn’t as strong as the old laptop (always says Low now, used to be Medium-High).

I haven’t changed anything with my Linksys WRT54G and my work space is the same, so I’m assuming that it is the new laptop (HP, same as the old).

I’ve actually had better success recently… I bought a Dell laptop and NetGear wireless router about two years ago. For the first year or so, I’d constantly have the signal drop and be unable to connect but for the past year or so it’s been fairly dependable. Maybe it’ll drop for no reason once every 2-3 months, not 2-3 times a week like it used to. I don’t always get full signal strength, though, even though I’m typically only 15 ft. from the router. I still live in the same condo in a high rise, and there are still lots of other networks visible. I haven’t moved the location of my router or changed where I typically use the computer.

The wireless on my MacBook Pro has always been pretty terrible, even when in the same room as my router (I blame it on the aluminum case). The wireless on my Wii and Asus Eee have always been solid.

Notes: I had more problems with the Mac on a Linksys WRT54G than my new D-link DGL -4300 but still way more disconnects than my other devices. I only have problems with the Mac at my apartment building where there are 5-8 other wireless routers in the area (although I run mine on a free channel), but the Wii and Eee still don’t have problems.

It’s getting worse where I live in London. When I scan now there’s a ridiculous amount of devices in the area (everything seems to come with wireless now, from satellite TV boxes to standard broadband equipment.)

And our PCs are much worse than the Macs, it seems like the Windows drivers get flakey when there’s interference or weak signals. Sometimes Windows just gives up and claims the network isn’t there until a machine is rebooted. It’s not much fun when I only use a PC to test sites in IE!

I use a Ruckus Wireless router at home and LUH -HUVE it. I have max bars everywhere in my apt, including through 3 walls and several doors. It’s ability to steer the signal to me, and directly to me, is incredible. Sure, it’s a little more expensive, but it’s totally worth it to have full signal strength and no dropouts.

And I love being able to stream video to my front room tv in full HD quality with no signal loss either. And there are at least 8 or 9 other networks that I can see around me.

I live in a house in the suburbs, with only a few neighbors’ APs visible, so no problems here!

No problems here in densely populated SoMA, San Francisco.

We have three machines, all Apple laptops on a Netgear WGR614v6.

I think you need a new laptop or network card!

I couldn’t have read this at a better time. I’ve opened and closed my browser three times, restarted my computer and even reset my router all to no avail. My connection has grown noticeably worse as over the last few months.

My old D-Link router at home gradually got worse even though I lived in a small village with no other signals. I had to get a different antenna from eBay just to get a signal in my bedroom (10ft away), when I came to uni I couldn’t even get a signal next to it so I ordered a new router.

I got a Netgear DG834G (v2 – at home I now have v3 which supports WPA2 ) and that is great. I get full signal when on my desk (unsuprising as the router is under it :P) and there are 14 other networks in range. Im currently typing this from the kitchen (about 50ft away through about 3 concrete walls with lots of interference from electricals – mainly the boiler) with 3/4 bars, and this is with wireless isolation turned on.

If only my internet connection was this good, my landlord provides 512k broadband which constantly drops connections. :(

There is also an issue with the MacBook Air wifi. The wifi performance degraded quickly over a couple of days until it stopped working completely. I changed the wifi channel in my router the problem was gone.

I was on channel 11. I tried 13 first, but it did not work. The air wouldn’t even find the router. Then I changed it to 4 and it worked immediately.

I live in silicon valley. At my old apartment, I could see 20 networks – my MacBook Pros barely got 3 bars of usable signal 15 feet from my base station.

Fortunately my new neighbors are luddites and I can only see 3 networks now, and the other two are both competing for the same channel.

For streaming video i’ve found my wireless to be really dodgy, so i’ve started using one of these:

Devolo

Would highly recommend one if you are looking to stream lots of data, saves ripping your walls up and laying network cables. I still use my wireless for browsing the net with my laptop.