I just recently bought my MacBook Air 11" this summer and it is currently running on OS X Mountain Lion. I purchased it in the United States and had very minimal problems with it. I bought it for the purpose of using it for my work in France for the next 8 months. I just arrived this week and have been unable to connect to any WiFi networks whatsoever. I have not set up a personal connection at my apartment but it continues not to work when I bring my laptop to the school I work which has a very strong unsecured WiFi connection.
Is there something I'm missing here? I have never had WiFi problems before but upon moving to France, my US-bought MacBook Air just doesn't want to connect. I keep receiving "A connection timeout occured". I want to believe it's just the signal but I see no reason why it shouldn't connect to a strong signal– and I would hate to assume that's the case only to set up my own WiFi at home and find it still doesn't work weeks later. The location is set to Automatic at the moment.
Any step-by-step qdvice would help. I am extremely new to Apple products and not great with the lingo or navigation quite yet so thorough directions of how to approach the diqgnostic would be very helpful. Thank you!
Best Answer
Given you are using 2.4 GHz Wifi, there are 2 channels (namely 12 and 13) available in Europe, that are not allowed in the US and are therefore not supported by US-bought WIFI adapters. See Wi-Fi Channel availability
As far as I know Apple uses different Wifi-modules for european and US-models, so there's little hope to fix that in software.
Ask a fellow student to look up on which channel he is connected. If it's 12 or 13 you won't be able to connect.