Mac Book Air & WiFi Routers

Two days back, I got my ADSL router fried due to a near field lightening strike, and I had to replace the router. I bought a D-Link DSL 2750u and configured it, my MBA happily connected, and everything was working fine.

This morning, when I woke up, I was in for a surprise, because suddenly my MBA stopped recognising the WiFi Network. It sees all other WiFi networks, connects without any hiccups to those, but not this one. I tried the typical first aids — restarting router, restarting my laptop, no luck. My mobile and other devices can connect to the WiFi network without any problems, but not the Mac Book Air. At random times, MBA sees the WiFi network, but when I try to connect it says ‘A Connection Timeout Has Occurred’ (WTH?).

After few minutes spent on Google, saw that Apple devices are known to have some problems with particular WiFi Channels. I checked the WiFi Channel on my router and saw that it was set to AUTO. I changed it to Channel 6, and voila — the MBA see’s and connects to the WiFi smoothly.

So if you are facing any WiFi issues on your Mac devices, try changing the Wireless Channel. On my D-Link Router, it was found in the Administration Console under Wireless -> Basic Settings.

[2016/11/27] Update on TP-Link Routers:

My D-Link router got fried due to lightening, and I had to fallback on the TP-Link router that is provided by my ISP. When I started using that connection with my Mac Book Air, my WiFi connection started to disconnect every now and then. This was very annoying and the solution for this was to set the WiFi standard to 802.11g instead of ’n’. Seems like ’n’ doesn’t play well between Macs and TP-Link.