MacBook – Consistently slow and unreliable Wi-Fi everywhere I go. 2012 MBP

airportinternetmacbook prowifi

I have a mid-2012 MacBook Pro. (13-inch, 8gb memory.) I work remotely and spend a lot of time working from coffee shops and other places with public Wi-fi.

Lately – for a couple of months now – I've noticed that I'm getting far more problems with Wi-fi connectivity than normal. My wi-fi connection will drop, I'll be unable to connect ("A connection timeout occurred") or the connection will be hopelessly slow.

This is happening so often, on so many different networks, that I'm starting to think that the problem is with my laptop and not with the coffee shops.

How would I even begin diagnosing this problem? I have no idea. I downloaded an app called Little Snitch which displays information about what's using the Internet connection but I can't see anything unusual which might be clogging the bandwidth.

For what it's worth, here's the information about my Airport card from System Profiler:

Software Versions:
  CoreWLAN: 3.4 (340.18)
  CoreWLANKit:  2.0.2 (202.11)
  Menu Extra:   8.1 (810.11)
  configd plug-in:  8.5 (850.252)
  System Information:   8.3 (830.5)
  IO80211 Family:   5.3 (530.5)
  Diagnostics:  2.1 (210.25)
  AirPort Utility:  6.3.1 (631.4)
  Interfaces:
en1:
  Card Type:    AirPort Extreme  (0x14E4, 0xF5)
  Firmware Version: Broadcom BCM43xx 1.0 (5.106.98.100.17)
  MAC Address:  5c:96:9d:83:bd:5d
  Locale:   ETSI
  Country Code: FR
  Supported PHY Modes:  802.11 a/b/g/n
  Supported Channels:   1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 36, 40, 44, 48, 52, 56, 60, 64, 100, 104, 108, 112, 116, 120, 124, 128, 132, 136, 140
  Wake On Wireless: Supported
  AirDrop:  Supported
  Status:   Connected

Best Answer

Since I wrote this post my Internet problems seem to have gotten a lot better. As far as I can remember, I only made two more changes. I can't say for sure which one of these helped, or if either them helped at all and maybe there was some other factor I'm forgetting, but they may be worth a try:

  1. I changed my DNS settings to use Google's Public DNS. I can't remember what they were previously, but I definitely remember playing around with my DNS settings a few months ago so this may have been the culprit.

  2. I changed the automatic MU settings, following the instructions on this page.

Hopefully someone will find one or both of these to be helpful!

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