20 Aug 2011
My story is like many others out there: Having purchased a new Mac in the last few weeks, arriving pre-installed with Lion, I had a few days of bliss before the problems began. Failing to connect to my wireless router, incredibly slow speeds when it did and unresponsive the majority of the time. Steve Jobs had ripped my heart out using nothing but a spoon.
I tried clearing various ram caches, recreating the wireless connection in network preferences, setting custom DNS, manual IP address, rebooting the router, performing dance rituals to the wireless dities etc and I was beginning to lose hope. Mention of an upcoming 10.7.1 update had me hopeful, but upon installation I had a few minutes of joy before the problems returned with all it’s troublesome tendencies. So what did work for me? Changing my wireless routers channel, specifically to channel 4 (avoid anything over 11 for the BT HomeHub router).
Now many have reported various fixes having worked but I’ve felt compelled to post this as not only have I got wireless working flawlessly on the Lion installed Mac Mini, but I’ve noticed a huge stability and performance increase. So regardless of whether you continue to have issues or not, switching up the wireless channel may work wizardry for you. Everything is sharper, more responsive and as a broadband speed test has shown me, more consistent, with the speed chart not varying over the course of the test. If you have BT Broadband, and in particular, you’re using an older HomeHub, give this a go and you may be surprised. The automatic channel selection works incorrectly in versions of the HomeHub prior to the latest version 3 from what I’ve read. Now, go forth and get back on that information super highway…