> 2. There's no reason why your macbook should keep disconnecting from Wifi. Perhaps you live somewhere with a lot of RF noise? Or you have a cheap/crappy router? Again, this is an issue which many people don't face. Mostly Wifi just works.

I've went through tons of routers, and on those routers all available firmwares (dd-wrt. open-wrt, tomato, etc).

I've been using an Asus RT-AC87U for the last couple of years now, on Merlins firmware (slightly altered stock). I want to say it's great, but really it's just the least sucky router [0] I've had.

Wifi has never mostly worked. At least I've never experienced it. With a wifi dongle on my desktop PC I could go for a few weeks without issue, but I often find at least one (random) phone to be disconnecting at times when I'm trying to access something locally on my network. I never have to reboot the router at least, but have to manually reconnect devices when issues occur, and of course it breaks any connections I had.

I installed a wired network in our house just this week, for the devices I care about the most.

I have never been on or even heard of a wifi network that always works. I imagine that any such suggestion is a statement of minimizing the time when it fails, which is great, but it has never been on par with wired in reliability. I would be very happy if it did, but I won't hold my breath.

[0] Nitpick: We're talking about the AP part of the router, the router part is quite stable and I've had no wired issues.

> I have never been on or even heard of a wifi network that always works.

Years ago I had this problem and bought an Apple router. My wifi has always 'just worked' ever since. There was an entire thread of people on here on HN saying the same thing when Apple decided to stop making them. Wifi, like cell, is very anecdotal because of things out of your control.

Similar experience with Apple access points. After getting fed up with crappy gear which needed a daily restart, had awful range, overheated despite proper ventilation, would in theory allow simultaneous dual band but in practice really didn't, etc etc etc I bought a Time Capsule (the Airport Extreme with built-in hard disk) around 5 years ago and couldn't be happier. The connection has always been absolutely rock solid. My only complaint is that the client app got dumbed down more and more, down to a level I found really irritating.

It's a real shame they decided to discontinue them - they were absolutely the single consumer brand which didn't plain suck in my experience. Awful experience with Asus (overheating), Netgear (5 disconnects per hour), Cisco/Linksys (radio part died after a firmware upgrade, long fight to RMA a 3 days old unit), D-link (signal wouldn't cross a single wall), etc.

Fortunately I recently decided to look past the consumer products and discovered Ubiquiti. What a breath of fresh air. Amazing performance and range, all the stability of Apple without the Fisher-Price interface.

It's shocking just how good the Ubiquiti gear is.

My setup at home is:

Motorola Surfboard SB6183

Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X

Uniquiti Unifi AP

I set it up once and the only outages I've had were when my provider (Time Warner in NYC) had issues that made the Surfboard loose connectivity. Despite the fact that I'm in an incredibly noisy RF environment, I've never had trouble connecting to my AP.

If had spare time and money, this is a business I'd try:

- partner with Ubiquiti to white label their gear

- build an app to make the APs easy to setup

- work hard to become the Wirecutter's top pick

- sell them on Amazon

I've had Apple routers as well. While above average, and not requiring restarts, it wasn't better than other premium (consumer grade) routers I've had. Of course, anecdata, but just for clarification:

Are you saying you never have any wifi issues? Even every other month?

I think the OP question touched on problems existing, but small enough for many to "accept them" as status quo, and him/her questioning if he/she was the only one bothered by them. I am one of those people too. Thus my question of whether or not you actually have no problems, or simply "no problems requiring intervention, other than waiting/reconnecting".

We have a decent wifi router and it's been running for over a year now with no issues.

Our internet has gone down (Uverse fiber), but that's outside of our home and there's little we can do about it.

My phone - a Nexus 5X - is probably the flakiest bit of tech that I have. I reboot it every 10 days or so. The next worst is the AT&T DVRs. They are terribly designed, painful to use, and have bugs.

Most of the tech in my house (Canon printer, QNAP raid box, Hikvision cameras, PS4, Roku, Wii-U, Onkyo receiver, Samsung and Toshiba televisions, iPads, iPhones, Samsung Tablet, Thinkpad, MacBook, gaming PC, Kindles, etc...) have basically no recurring problems. We've had brown outs where the power goes down but not off that made me have to go reboot everything, but other than that, no real problems. Our VitaMix blender does blow one breaker, but that's not really a tech issue.

> Are you saying you never have any wifi issues? Even every other month?

Correct. It just works. The base station I have is also really old at this point. It is the larger flat one without simultaneous 5g bought ~2008. I bought it after I went through some of the other cheaper options that would cause my VPN to drop randomly throughout the day.

I want to upgrade to something with the newer standards and more speed, but I'm worried about going back to an unstable connection. I've been thinking about either the Netgear R6400 or the Google wifi 3 pack.

FWIW, I switched from an Apple router to a Google OnHub one, and it also works absolutely seamlessly. Tried a cheaper Netgear one inbetween and it was a nightmare. Sometimes it's better to just pay a little bit more money.

Check out Ubiquiti gear. I've been wanting to upgrade to their Unifi line, but haven't convinced the spouse that I need the money when it "works" to her. The random drop-outs don't bug you when you aren't constantly SSHed into something, and the bursty speeds aren't bad when you aren't moving files to and fro on the internal network. :(

There was a cool blog recently on HN about switching to Ubiquiti HW: https://www.troyhunt.com/ubiquiti-all-the-things-how-i-final...

Yeah, the RT-AC87U is known to have a buggy Quantenna WiFi chip, especially the 5ghz. There are many reports of problems over on snbforums.

The RT-AC68U or RT-AC88U are better choices (because they use Broadcom?). My RT-N66U has been a flawless AP for years.

Interesting, I'll have to investigate this, I've had other Asus in the past, but not those two versions. I'll have to check the chips on the ones I've had.

Thank you for the tip!

You might also be interested in the Ubiquiti Unifi WiFi APs. They are access points, so you still need a router and a switch. I got a Unifi AP AC Lite recently, and it's probably the best AP I've ever used, behind perhaps only the Apple ones.

>I have never been on or even heard of a wifi network that always works.

Well, I work from home, and my wi-fi network (different routers across several homes, mostly Mac clients) has always worked.

The only thing that had issues was the DSL connection crapping out (usually once per 2 weeks or so) and having to restart the router to re-sync.

But no wi-fi issues, or machines disconnecting etc.

That said I always lived in single floor apartments (but with concrete walls). So I never had to try to e.g. bring wifi to the basement or so.

I have the same router with the same firmware. I'm using a mid-2014 MBP Retina and my Echo Dot works great along with all my wireless devices both in 2.4G and 5G. My setup is basically Internet -> pfSense -> RT-AC87U with Webpass. Over 5G, I get 250+ mbit.

Oh, yes, the wireless performance I get is great, it's the reliability I take issue with. You never get any disconnects or hickups?

I have the exact same router (with Merlins firmware) and never get any disconnects and I have a lot of devices (mbp, macbook air, macbook, iphones, android tablet and ipad).

Do you live in an area with a lot of RF noise? or with a lot of other Wifi networks? I've stayed for a month in New York last year at a place with a lot of other wifi networks and my Macbooks became much more flaky when connecting to wifi.

Maybe you can try changing the wifi channel?

But I can say that having an internet connection that's not great definitely creates a lot of problem and additional frustration. I was way more frustrated when I stayed that month in New York (for some reason the internet connection had intermittent packet loss), I'm really quite surprised at how bad internet connections are in the US.

A house in suburbia. I can see maybe 5, possibly 10 networks tops, with a good client. I'd categorize that as "not a lot of noise", at least not from other WLANs.

I've tried different channels, but is that suggestion in regards to the signal (which is not a problem for me) or for its effect on reliability of keeping the connection?

No disconnects at all. I don't reboot the router often at all either. In fact I realized I probably should reboot one after realizing some issues with the onboard RAM and the uptime was over 3 months at that point.

I'm in the San Francisco area so you'd think RF noise would be pretty heavily present here. Before this I had the TP-Link AC1200 and I had all the issues you mentioned with that.

ASUS RT-N66U FTW. It's not cheap, but the damn thing is pretty much perfect.

Making wireless work isn't a matter of throwing money at the problem and buying off the shelf products, unfortunately. Nor is it a binary "works" vs. "doesn't work." I want to say I have "flawless" wifi at my house, but in reality I've looked at the use cases of all of my regular users and optimized the wireless network to be reliable and performant for those uses. This includes:

a dedicated network router and dedicated access points. The placement of the access points is key. They should be in the dead center of the area they're meant to cover and not be near any radio absorbing materials. You pretty much can't do that if you have to put your access point at the place where your internet comes into your house. I use Ubiquiti Edgerouter and AP equipment[0]. I had to wire cat6 between my basement and my entryway closet to get good placement of my access points.

testing and optimizing frequencies for the environment. I live out in the suburbs, but I still have to contend with my neighbor's RF noise. I use a tool for MacOS called Wifi Signal [1] that identifies clear channels and regularly suggests improvements.

Understanding the differences in the technologies available. I have a large house, and lots of high bandwidth equipment, as well as some low bandwidth equipment. The low bandwidth equipment (eg. Nest thermostats, raspberry pi garage door controllers) stays on the slower, longer range 2.4 ghz access point and I don't have to particularly care about placement. The high bandwidth equipment (laptops, desktops, set top box) is set to prefer the high bandwidth short range 5ghz network, and I placed my access points close to their points of use. Equipment like phones and laptops that move around are set to prefer the 5ghz network, but accept the 2.4 ghz network when they're too far from the access points. Newer access points allow you to specify minimum signal qualities to encourage clients to switch networks sooner when their signal quality drops too far to be useful.

I put a lot of effort and more money than normal into this solution, but the result is that my family generally doesn't notice the network. It just works, all the time. When we visit other people's houses, the wireless is bad and that's just something that is weird about other places. I want to say guests in my house get good wireless coverage, but if they do something with their devices that my family doesn't (like try to stream movies from a hammock in the back yard), or get on the "wrong" network, I can't guarantee much.

0: https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ac/ 1: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wifi-signal/id525912054?mt=1...

A lot of good points here. But your opening statement...

> Making wireless work isn't a matter of throwing money at the problem and buying off the shelf products, unfortunately. Nor is it a binary "works" vs. "doesn't work." I want to say I have "flawless" wifi at my house, but in reality I've looked at the use cases of all of my regular users and optimized the wireless network to be reliable and performant for those uses.

... I think fits with the question the OP asked, and my follow up to. Since it's not a binary, and people have different levels of acceptance, and different levels of work put in to getting that number closer to 1 than 0, that is my issue. A stable router and wired devices "just works" for at least the last couple of decades.

I can likely get a better WLAN than the one I have, but I have already put in more time than I'd like to. At this point if I can't throw money at it, I'll rather just throw money at installing cat6a, which I did for the stuff I cared about (desktop, htpc, server).

> I put a lot of effort and more money than normal into this solution, but the result is that my family generally doesn't notice the network. It just works, all the time.

Contradicting as it is to your first statement, do you really mean this though? Or is it simply "works well enough, within reasonable efforts, means and expectations"?

Regarding the first and last statements contradicting, I mean that when my family uses the network in the ways I have anticipated and built around, it works consistently and without interruption. This is different than saying it just works for everyone and anything they want to do. I think "just works for everyone doing anything" is what people want, and expect when they spend hundreds of dollars on a product, but I don't believe that's possible when you're dealing with the current state of the art in computer wireless networks. You need to take into account the environment and the requirements.

Also, yes, replacing wireless links with cat6 where possible is certainly the more reliable solution. Fixed location high bandwidth devices shouldn't be using wireless if it can be avoided at all.

I've had considerable problems between MacBook Pros and Airport Extremes in both noisy and extremely radio-quiet locations.

I'm not shocked if somebody drops $3,000+ on a MBP, and can't reliably connect to an AP from the same vendor, let alone any other vendor.

That's quite unusual in my experience. Even most low end / lost cost routers are pretty damn reliable these days. In an office complex with more than a dozen competing networks I use wifi 8 hours a day and rarely have a blip. Have you by any chance being moving one of the same wifi devices between all the different places you've had problems? Another thing, which wouldn't explain all the different locations, is a problem with your electrical wiring / loading. For example I used to have a Dell ethernet switch that would reliably reboot itself whenever other devices it shared a power strip with were under a heavy load. I could actually force reboot it by starting a dd between the right combination of disks in a server. I guess that does technically qualify as out of band management.

fwiw, I own/sort-of-run an MSP/break-fix shop, and we see a lot of this sort of thing. People only ever call us when something's busted, so it distorts our perception of the reliability of technology, but we literally spend all day, every day troubleshooting technical issues.

For routers specifically, people are going to have a wide range of experiences depending on the brand (and sometimes model) they purchased. They all have their own quirks. D-Link tends to experience intermittent packet loss, Netgear has sudden intermittent loss of radio signal, ASUS routers just simply stop routing packets every few weeks or so. For off-the-shelf, we tend to see the fewest complaints from Linksys wireless devices, but their wired devices are pretty unreliable.

Engenius, which you'll see in a lot of commercial deployments, are over-priced and the radios in them just give up and go home after about a year or so.

This is one of my favorite soapboxes, so I gotta be careful not to get carried away, but I really sympathize with the GP upthread. Mail software, iOS, MacOS, Windows of course, networking, printers, phone systems, camera systems, databases, the whole kit & kaboodle is full of infuriating behavior and it keeps getting harder and harder to diagnose, since nobody believes in ugly things like log files or serviceable hardware anymore.

I'm currently in the process of selling my break-fix business, because it's an infinite suck-hole that's stupidly difficult to make money on, and moving full-time to software development where I can at least close a bug report once in a while.

I don't have any professional experience diagnosing problems like this, but I've managed more than a few large-ish home networks (many roommates, large family w/ a ton of devices, etc.) in sprawling houses with thick foundations all the way to signal-dense apartment buildings where 2.4GHz is all but useless.

I personally cannot believe how terrible consumer-grade WiFi has stayed. You'd think that some of these manufacturers would be upping their QC at some point: I've experienced all the random undiagnosable problems you've described where nothing short of rebooting the router fixes things, and only until things break again later. I currently own one of those fancy Netgear Nighthawk routers and after months of going through PCI-Express cards on my desktop machine where random packet loss made gaming impossible (but not on any other devices even in the same room), I finally gave up and bought a 100ft cable off of Monoprice and ran it over some doorframes with tape.

I see a lot of buzz around all this "pro-sumer" mesh network gear[1], but I haven't had the kind of sprawling living situation that justifies it yet. (Though I did just recommend that article to a coworker on a very large property, and he's hoping it fixes his many, many problems.)

> it keeps getting harder and harder to diagnose, since nobody believes in ugly things like log files or serviceable hardware anymore.

Hear hear. To OP's original point, I can't believe how much stuff simply doesn't work like it's supposed to. I always thought it was my high-tech demands for plugging together services/software that weren't necessarily built for each other (e.g. Google Music on a Roku, or Snapchat on an Android phone), but after going home last Thanksgiving, it's unbelievable to me how many mainline iOS scenarios are completely broken. Every conversation I had with relatives was "oh yeah, that's easy to fix...lemme see...wait, what?...that doesn't make any sense...google-fu...huh, I guess there's some random problems with this...let's try deleting/re-adding your account...okay, that didn't do anything...wtf..." Throw in some "you got your iCloud password wrong twice and now we're locked out, time to go through insane account recovery", and I was ready to move to the woods and give up technology forever.

> moving full-time to software development where I can at least close a bug report once in a while.

Hahaha, grass is greener, man. Be prepared to be not fixing A LOT more bugs. ;)

[1] http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-wi-fi-mesh-networking-...

Not a panacea but for me using exclusively 5 GHz fixed wifi once and for all.

To offer a contradictory piece of anecdata, I had to disable 5GHz to maintain a consistent wifi connection.

Isn't technology fun?

my co-worker has an apple wireless keyboard at work (BYOD). if he moves it more than two inches it will disconnect from his MBP (also BYOD). _very_ annoying when I need to type something for him...

I personally think someone has put an apple-curse on him, he blames it on cheap batteries.

Why you're not shocked?

Because he had "considerable problems" with his Apple products? Basically Apple release unfinished product and let users test it - and it shows in the software quality.

(Don't even ask about the quality of any of their "1.0" products - full of bugs every time, newest example is the touch bar.)

I love solving problems like this at work.

I hate solving problems like this at home. Part of the challenge is that I don't have the same resources, though.

> Perhaps you live somewhere with a lot of RF noise?

I hate this X-factor of WiFi with a passion. It's something that legitimately can vary in the time domain, either periodic or aperiodic. I have no good way to rule it out.

I have started using home powerline adapters and found them to be effective and reliable high throughput, low-latency connections to the smart TV/set top devices in my home.

My macbook disconnects from wifi once per day, quite consistently. I'm just used to it now, and reconnect and within a minute or so I am good to go again.

Things like that are why I wired network to all the important places - like my desk. I work from home. I don't want to think about wifi issues. I think I'd have to spend quite a bit to get wifi that was as solid as being on the wire - and that just isn't worth it to me. I never trust wifi to work, but that said I do have an Echo on each floor of my house and they are wifi only. Once in a while I notice they are spinning blue while they reconnect, but I don't know the last time that it didn't work when I tried to use it.

Its probably that the OP has wifi problems possibly very crowded spectrum or they haven't got wifi set up properly and apple is known for being a bit hit and miss with wifi.

I recommend if you have a choice get yourself your own modem. Switching to my own Motorola SB6141 was the best investment besides getting a decent router. Just a thought.