The curious story of the MacBook Pro and the Wireless Router

Timeline:

• Tuesday – arrival of MacBook Pro. Much ooo-ing and aw-ing.
• Tuesday night – MacBook Pro fails miserably to connect to my wireless network
• Wednesday morning – 1am. Give up.
• Wednesday morning – 6.30am. Let’s rebuild it, apparently there was a patch that made wireless sub-optimal
• Wednesday morning – 9am. Nope, it is knackered.
• Wednesday evening – Patch it again and see if it works. Turn on WEP, turn off WEP, turn on WPA, turn off WPA, switch off SID Broadcast, switch on SID Broadcast
• Wednesday evening – 8pm onwards. Install BootCamp so that I can install Vista. Vista goes on smoothly.
• Wednesday evening (continued) – See if Vista can connect to the wireless network. Yep. No problem at all!

And then I booted back into Mac OSX. Wireless still not working; it can see the network but it can’t negotiate with it. Then I noticed that Bluetooth was activated; I am not a big fan of Bluetooth being on by default and I noticed that it was on by default and my Mac was discoverable. Switched that off and, hey presto, the AirPort connected to the specified network.

So, it looks like their was some kinda collision between the Bluetooth and the wireless. I put Bluetooth back on after it connected to the router and everything seemed dandy.

There are a lot of people with a lot of problems with 3^rd party routers and the 802.11 N cards in most of the Intel Macs; maybe this will help you?

Need to see if the Mac can consistently connect before I jump for joy though!

Tags: Apple, Wireless+Router, Fault, Defect, PITA, AirPort, Vista, Mac+OSX, MacBook+Pro, 3Com