5 ms·

> 2. There's no reason why your macbook should keep disconnecting from Wifi. Perhaps you live somewhere with a lot of RF noise? Or you have a cheap/crappy route

by croon 10y ago

> 2. There's no reason why your macbook should keep disconnecting from Wifi. Perhaps you live somewhere with a lot of RF noise? Or you have a cheap/crappy router? Again, this is an issue which many people don't face. Mostly Wifi just works. I've went through tons of routers, and on those routers all available firmwares (dd-wrt. open-wrt, tomato, etc). I've been using an Asus RT-AC87U for the last couple of years now, on Merlins firmware (slightly altered stock). I want to say it's great, but really it's just the least sucky router [0] I've had. Wifi has never mostly worked. At least I've never experienced it. With a wifi dongle on my desktop PC I could go for a few weeks without issue, but I often find at least one (random) phone to be disconnecting at times when I'm trying to access something locally on my network. I never have to reboot the router at least, but have to manually reconnect devices when issues occur, and of course it breaks any connections I had. I installed a wired network in our house just this week, for the devices I care about the most. I have never been on or even heard of a wifi network that always works. I imagine that any such suggestion is a statement of minimizing the time when it fails, which is great, but it has never been on par with wired in reliability. I would be very happy if it did, but I won't hold my breath. [0] Nitpick: We're talking about the AP part of the router, the router part is quite stable and I've had no wired issues.

therein 10y ago
I have the same router with the same firmware. I'm using a mid-2014 MBP Retina and my Echo Dot works great along with all my wireless devices both in 2.4G and 5G. My setup is basically Internet -> pfSense -> RT-AC87U with Webpass. Over 5G, I get 250+ mbit.
- croon 10y ago
  Oh, yes, the wireless performance I get is great, it's the reliability I take issue with. You never get any disconnects or hickups?
  - nicolas_t 10y ago
    I have the exact same router (with Merlins firmware) and never get any disconnects and I have a lot of devices (mbp, macbook air, macbook, iphones, android tablet and ipad). Do you live in an area with a lot of RF noise? or with a lot of other Wifi networks? I've stayed for a month in New York last year at a place with a lot of other wifi networks and my Macbooks became much more flaky when connecting to wifi. Maybe you can try changing the wifi channel? But I can say that having an internet connection that's not great definitely creates a lot of problem and additional frustration. I was way more frustrated when I stayed that month in New York (for some reason the internet connection had intermittent packet loss), I'm really quite surprised at how bad internet connections are in the US.
    - croon 10y ago
      A house in suburbia. I can see maybe 5, possibly 10 networks tops, with a good client. I'd categorize that as "not a lot of noise", at least not from other WLANs. I've tried different channels, but is that suggestion in regards to the signal (which is not a problem for me) or for its effect on reliability of keeping the connection?
  - therein 10y ago
    No disconnects at all. I don't reboot the router often at all either. In fact I realized I probably should reboot one after realizing some issues with the onboard RAM and the uptime was over 3 months at that point. I'm in the San Francisco area so you'd think RF noise would be pretty heavily present here. Before this I had the TP-Link AC1200 and I had all the issues you mentioned with that.
bcook 10y ago
Yeah, the RT-AC87U is known to have a buggy Quantenna WiFi chip, especially the 5ghz. There are many reports of problems over on snbforums. The RT-AC68U or RT-AC88U are better choices (because they use Broadcom?). My RT-N66U has been a flawless AP for years.
- croon 10y ago
  Interesting, I'll have to investigate this, I've had other Asus in the past, but not those two versions. I'll have to check the chips on the ones I've had. Thank you for the tip!
  - Declanomous 10y ago
    You might also be interested in the Ubiquiti Unifi WiFi APs. They are access points, so you still need a router and a switch. I got a Unifi AP AC Lite recently, and it's probably the best AP I've ever used, behind perhaps only the Apple ones.
coldtea 10y ago
>I have never been on or even heard of a wifi network that always works. Well, I work from home, and my wi-fi network (different routers across several homes, mostly Mac clients) has always worked. The only thing that had issues was the DSL connection crapping out (usually once per 2 weeks or so) and having to restart the router to re-sync. But no wi-fi issues, or machines disconnecting etc. That said I always lived in single floor apartments (but with concrete walls). So I never had to try to e.g. bring wifi to the basement or so.
matwood 10y ago
> I have never been on or even heard of a wifi network that always works. Years ago I had this problem and bought an Apple router. My wifi has always 'just worked' ever since. There was an entire thread of people on here on HN saying the same thing when Apple decided to stop making them. Wifi, like cell, is very anecdotal because of things out of your control.
- gruturo 10y ago
  Similar experience with Apple access points. After getting fed up with crappy gear which needed a daily restart, had awful range, overheated despite proper ventilation, would in theory allow simultaneous dual band but in practice really didn't, etc etc etc I bought a Time Capsule (the Airport Extreme with built-in hard disk) around 5 years ago and couldn't be happier. The connection has always been absolutely rock solid. My only complaint is that the client app got dumbed down more and more, down to a level I found really irritating. It's a real shame they decided to discontinue them - they were absolutely the single consumer brand which didn't plain suck in my experience. Awful experience with Asus (overheating), Netgear (5 disconnects per hour), Cisco/Linksys (radio part died after a firmware upgrade, long fight to RMA a 3 days old unit), D-link (signal wouldn't cross a single wall), etc. Fortunately I recently decided to look past the consumer products and discovered Ubiquiti. What a breath of fresh air. Amazing performance and range, all the stability of Apple without the Fisher-Price interface.
  - L_Rahman 10y ago
    It's shocking just how good the Ubiquiti gear is. My setup at home is: Motorola Surfboard SB6183 Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X Uniquiti Unifi AP I set it up once and the only outages I've had were when my provider (Time Warner in NYC) had issues that made the Surfboard loose connectivity. Despite the fact that I'm in an incredibly noisy RF environment, I've never had trouble connecting to my AP. If had spare time and money, this is a business I'd try: - partner with Ubiquiti to white label their gear - build an app to make the APs easy to setup - work hard to become the Wirecutter's top pick - sell them on Amazon
- croon 10y ago
fps 10y ago
Making wireless work isn't a matter of throwing money at the problem and buying off the shelf products, unfortunately. Nor is it a binary "works" vs. "doesn't work." I want to say I have "flawless" wifi at my house, but in reality I've looked at the use cases of all of my regular users and optimized the wireless network to be reliable and performant for those uses. This includes: a dedicated network router and dedicated access points. The placement of the access points is key. They should be in the dead center of the area they're meant to cover and not be near any radio absorbing materials. You pretty much can't do that if you have to put your access point at the place where your internet comes into your house. I use Ubiquiti Edgerouter and AP equipment[0]. I had to wire cat6 between my basement and my entryway closet to get good placement of my access points. testing and optimizing frequencies for the environment. I live out in the suburbs, but I still have to contend with my neighbor's RF noise. I use a tool for MacOS called Wifi Signal [1] that identifies clear channels and regularly suggests improvements. Understanding the differences in the technologies available. I have a large house, and lots of high bandwidth equipment, as well as some low bandwidth equipment. The low bandwidth equipment (eg. Nest thermostats, raspberry pi garage door controllers) stays on the slower, longer range 2.4 ghz access point and I don't have to particularly care about placement. The high bandwidth equipment (laptops, desktops, set top box) is set to prefer the high bandwidth short range 5ghz network, and I placed my access points close to their points of use. Equipment like phones and laptops that move around are set to prefer the 5ghz network, but accept the 2.4 ghz network when they're too far from the access points. Newer access points allow you to specify minimum signal qualities to encourage clients to switch networks sooner when their signal quality drops too far to be useful. I put a lot of effort and more money than normal into this solution, but the result is that my family generally doesn't notice the network. It just works, all the time. When we visit other people's houses, the wireless is bad and that's just something that is weird about other places. I want to say guests in my house get good wireless coverage, but if they do something with their devices that my family doesn't (like try to stream movies from a hammock in the back yard), or get on the "wrong" network, I can't guarantee much. 0: https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ac/ https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ac/ 1: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wifi-signal/id525912054?mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wifi-signal/id525912054?mt=1...
- croon 10y ago
SnacksOnAPlane 10y ago
ASUS RT-N66U FTW. It's not cheap, but the damn thing is pretty much perfect.
ajford 10y ago
Check out Ubiquiti gear. I've been wanting to upgrade to their Unifi line, but haven't convinced the spouse that I need the money when it "works" to her. The random drop-outs don't bug you when you aren't constantly SSHed into something, and the bursty speeds aren't bad when you aren't moving files to and fro on the internal network. :( There was a cool blog recently on HN about switching to Ubiquiti HW: https://www.troyhunt.com/ubiquiti-all-the-things-how-i-finally-fixed-my-dodgy-wifi/ https://www.troyhunt.com/ubiquiti-all-the-things-how-i-final...

by croon 10y ago

therein 10y ago

I have the same router with the same firmware. I'm using a mid-2014 MBP Retina and my Echo Dot works great along with all my wireless devices both in 2.4G and 5G. My setup is basically Internet -> pfSense -> RT-AC87U with Webpass. Over 5G, I get 250+ mbit.

croon 10y ago
Oh, yes, the wireless performance I get is great, it's the reliability I take issue with. You never get any disconnects or hickups?
- nicolas_t 10y ago
  I have the exact same router (with Merlins firmware) and never get any disconnects and I have a lot of devices (mbp, macbook air, macbook, iphones, android tablet and ipad). Do you live in an area with a lot of RF noise? or with a lot of other Wifi networks? I've stayed for a month in New York last year at a place with a lot of other wifi networks and my Macbooks became much more flaky when connecting to wifi. Maybe you can try changing the wifi channel? But I can say that having an internet connection that's not great definitely creates a lot of problem and additional frustration. I was way more frustrated when I stayed that month in New York (for some reason the internet connection had intermittent packet loss), I'm really quite surprised at how bad internet connections are in the US.
  - croon 10y ago
    A house in suburbia. I can see maybe 5, possibly 10 networks tops, with a good client. I'd categorize that as "not a lot of noise", at least not from other WLANs. I've tried different channels, but is that suggestion in regards to the signal (which is not a problem for me) or for its effect on reliability of keeping the connection?
- therein 10y ago
  No disconnects at all. I don't reboot the router often at all either. In fact I realized I probably should reboot one after realizing some issues with the onboard RAM and the uptime was over 3 months at that point. I'm in the San Francisco area so you'd think RF noise would be pretty heavily present here. Before this I had the TP-Link AC1200 and I had all the issues you mentioned with that.

bcook 10y ago

Yeah, the RT-AC87U is known to have a buggy Quantenna WiFi chip, especially the 5ghz. There are many reports of problems over on snbforums. The RT-AC68U or RT-AC88U are better choices (because they use Broadcom?). My RT-N66U has been a flawless AP for years.

croon 10y ago
Interesting, I'll have to investigate this, I've had other Asus in the past, but not those two versions. I'll have to check the chips on the ones I've had. Thank you for the tip!
- Declanomous 10y ago
  You might also be interested in the Ubiquiti Unifi WiFi APs. They are access points, so you still need a router and a switch. I got a Unifi AP AC Lite recently, and it's probably the best AP I've ever used, behind perhaps only the Apple ones.

coldtea 10y ago

>I have never been on or even heard of a wifi network that always works. Well, I work from home, and my wi-fi network (different routers across several homes, mostly Mac clients) has always worked. The only thing that had issues was the DSL connection crapping out (usually once per 2 weeks or so) and having to restart the router to re-sync. But no wi-fi issues, or machines disconnecting etc. That said I always lived in single floor apartments (but with concrete walls). So I never had to try to e.g. bring wifi to the basement or so.

matwood 10y ago

> I have never been on or even heard of a wifi network that always works. Years ago I had this problem and bought an Apple router. My wifi has always 'just worked' ever since. There was an entire thread of people on here on HN saying the same thing when Apple decided to stop making them. Wifi, like cell, is very anecdotal because of things out of your control.

gruturo 10y ago
Similar experience with Apple access points. After getting fed up with crappy gear which needed a daily restart, had awful range, overheated despite proper ventilation, would in theory allow simultaneous dual band but in practice really didn't, etc etc etc I bought a Time Capsule (the Airport Extreme with built-in hard disk) around 5 years ago and couldn't be happier. The connection has always been absolutely rock solid. My only complaint is that the client app got dumbed down more and more, down to a level I found really irritating. It's a real shame they decided to discontinue them - they were absolutely the single consumer brand which didn't plain suck in my experience. Awful experience with Asus (overheating), Netgear (5 disconnects per hour), Cisco/Linksys (radio part died after a firmware upgrade, long fight to RMA a 3 days old unit), D-link (signal wouldn't cross a single wall), etc. Fortunately I recently decided to look past the consumer products and discovered Ubiquiti. What a breath of fresh air. Amazing performance and range, all the stability of Apple without the Fisher-Price interface.
- L_Rahman 10y ago
  It's shocking just how good the Ubiquiti gear is. My setup at home is: Motorola Surfboard SB6183 Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X Uniquiti Unifi AP I set it up once and the only outages I've had were when my provider (Time Warner in NYC) had issues that made the Surfboard loose connectivity. Despite the fact that I'm in an incredibly noisy RF environment, I've never had trouble connecting to my AP. If had spare time and money, this is a business I'd try: - partner with Ubiquiti to white label their gear - build an app to make the APs easy to setup - work hard to become the Wirecutter's top pick - sell them on Amazon
croon 10y ago

fps 10y ago

Making wireless work isn't a matter of throwing money at the problem and buying off the shelf products, unfortunately. Nor is it a binary "works" vs. "doesn't work." I want to say I have "flawless" wifi at my house, but in reality I've looked at the use cases of all of my regular users and optimized the wireless network to be reliable and performant for those uses. This includes: a dedicated network router and dedicated access points. The placement of the access points is key. They should be in the dead center of the area they're meant to cover and not be near any radio absorbing materials. You pretty much can't do that if you have to put your access point at the place where your internet comes into your house. I use Ubiquiti Edgerouter and AP equipment[0]. I had to wire cat6 between my basement and my entryway closet to get good placement of my access points. testing and optimizing frequencies for the environment. I live out in the suburbs, but I still have to contend with my neighbor's RF noise. I use a tool for MacOS called Wifi Signal [1] that identifies clear channels and regularly suggests improvements. Understanding the differences in the technologies available. I have a large house, and lots of high bandwidth equipment, as well as some low bandwidth equipment. The low bandwidth equipment (eg. Nest thermostats, raspberry pi garage door controllers) stays on the slower, longer range 2.4 ghz access point and I don't have to particularly care about placement. The high bandwidth equipment (laptops, desktops, set top box) is set to prefer the high bandwidth short range 5ghz network, and I placed my access points close to their points of use. Equipment like phones and laptops that move around are set to prefer the 5ghz network, but accept the 2.4 ghz network when they're too far from the access points. Newer access points allow you to specify minimum signal qualities to encourage clients to switch networks sooner when their signal quality drops too far to be useful. I put a lot of effort and more money than normal into this solution, but the result is that my family generally doesn't notice the network. It just works, all the time. When we visit other people's houses, the wireless is bad and that's just something that is weird about other places. I want to say guests in my house get good wireless coverage, but if they do something with their devices that my family doesn't (like try to stream movies from a hammock in the back yard), or get on the "wrong" network, I can't guarantee much. 0: https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ac/ https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ac/ 1: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wifi-signal/id525912054?mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wifi-signal/id525912054?mt=1...

croon 10y ago

SnacksOnAPlane 10y ago

ASUS RT-N66U FTW. It's not cheap, but the damn thing is pretty much perfect.

ajford 10y ago

Check out Ubiquiti gear. I've been wanting to upgrade to their Unifi line, but haven't convinced the spouse that I need the money when it "works" to her. The random drop-outs don't bug you when you aren't constantly SSHed into something, and the bursty speeds aren't bad when you aren't moving files to and fro on the internal network. :( There was a cool blog recently on HN about switching to Ubiquiti HW: https://www.troyhunt.com/ubiquiti-all-the-things-how-i-finally-fixed-my-dodgy-wifi/ https://www.troyhunt.com/ubiquiti-all-the-things-how-i-final...