I've had my Macbook Pro for about a year now. It is a late 2013 Retina model running Yosemite. Until a few days ago, its Wi-Fi worked fine. However, after the 10.10.5 update, its Wi-Fi has become very slow and drops packets unless I'm a foot away from my wifi router. When I'm in my usual location of the next room, ping times go up to hundreds of milliseconds.
shanglin$ ping 192.168.1.1
PING 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1): 56 data bytes
Request timeout for icmp_seq 0
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=944.501 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=325.487 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=78.760 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=126.286 ms
Request timeout for icmp_seq 5
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=6 ttl=64 time=41.813 ms
^C
--- 192.168.1.1 ping statistics ---
8 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 37.5% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 41.813/303.369/944.501/335.189 ms
None of the other devices on my Wi-Fi network are having a problem. I've tried removing plist files from SystemConfiguration, and I've turned off Bluetooth.
My Wi-Fi router is a Cisco E1200 running 802.11n on the 2.4GHz band. I don't think it can run on the 5GHz band. I've tried updating the router's firmware to the latest, but it has not helped.
Any suggestions that could help?
Best Answer
Jeez, those ping results are terrible.
I'm on El Capitan now, but I can relate to your frustrations about the wifi. My macbook pro is a late 2012 model. I travel with my laptop and rely on it as my phone. It was a real show stopper when wifi would completely bork on the road as in not letting me connect to open SSIDs.
I made this extreme script to wipe out wifi settings and it worked for me, but it is a pain to re-enter ssid/passwords etc and for some reason the problem would show up every now and then.
For me, if wi-fi doesn't work what's the point of having a keychain? I just wanted it to work, so I was willing to wipe things out to make it so. Mac OSX will create new clandestine defaults, but obviously if you want your passwords to friend's wifi etc, backup your keychain.
You can try the script but be warned, it may not fix your problem, it may even make things worse. I do not accept responsibility for use of this script. Please look at the files and directories it is deleting.
Alternately copy and paste everything but the "#!/bin/sh" bit and run it in a terminal, I have it in script form because it was a recurring issue for me on Yosemite, the problem went away when I either upgraded or clean installed Mavericks (can't remember which I did), so I would consider upgrading your OS to Mavericks possibly. El Capitan is still painful right now with bugs and so on, but at least wifi works.