Stephen Fry famously freaked out on Twitter a couple of months ago when trying to get a Windows Vista PC to join a wireless network (a couple of those links aren’t for the faint-hearted). I had exactly the opposite problem yesterday: an Apple MacBook that steadfastly refused to even acknowledge the presence of a specific wireless network.
The Mac could see other networks in the area and readily connected to the ones that weren’t security-enabled. Equally, laptops running both Windows XP and Windows Vista were happy to associate with this apparently evasive network and deal with its WPA security. Even my Nokia N95 mobile phone knew it was there and would happily connect with it.
The OS X Console utility wasn’t much help: a series of messages from SystemUIServer advising that there was an error joining the network, with a cryptic “Connection failed (16 result unavailable)” description. I did a few searches and came up with the rather worrying news that OS X Leopard is known to be rather flaky where wireless is concerned.
Nothing I read seemed to encapsulate my own problem. Even iStumbler failed to reveal the presence of the router sitting a couple of metres away from the Mac. Several local WLANs were broadcasting on channel 11, but I checked the router and it was using channel 13. On a hunch, I changed it to channel 10. Almost immediately, the Mac connected.
It turns out that in certain areas of the world, only the use of channels 1-11 is permitted. Europe uses channels 1-13, so why I encountered this problem with a British MacBook is unclear. Nevertheless, it’s a good example of a frequent situation in IT troubleshooting: sometimes a little bit of trial and error is the only way to really find out what’s going on.
Hi there. I’ve recently purchased a new Macbook (white). Using Airport Express. Have had all sorts of problems connecting from the Macbook – all the while my PC running XP connects fine. It seems that I can connect on certain channels (the higher ones 11, 13 etc.), but not on other channels (Ch 1 for instance). Because my PC (also 802.11n) connects fine no matter what channel, it can’t be an environmental issue. So far I’ve replaced the AE and today was given a replacement Macbook (the first one was declared DOA – they believed the reason I couldn’t connect to certain channels was because the Airport card was faulty). But now that I’m using my replacement Macbook and getting the same problem, I’m perplexed. Is the problem endemic? Something to do with the OS?
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Hi Damean. When I was researching my own problem, I came across a lot of reports of wireless connectivity problems with OS X Leopard (10.5). The majority of these seemd to affect people who had upgraded from the previous version of OS X (Tiger).
However, doing some more reading around, there also appears to be evidence of people who were already on Leopard experiencing problems when installing the 10.5.2 update (see this, for example). Dropping back to 802.11g is one suggested fix. There are plenty of other suggestions in the Apple Discussions thread referenced in that article above.
I guess the way forward is the usual trial & error method that I used to sort out my own issue. Do you just have this problem when connecting to your own router, or does it happen elsewhere too? I had this problem on my home network when I first bought the laptop, but since then I’ve been roaming around London with my MacBook and I’ve not come across a network that I couldn’t see or connect to.
My router allows me to set the channel from 1 to 14. I picked the highest one out of preference, but I just couldn’t get my laptop to see it. My iPod Touch worked with it just fine. Then it hit me that it usually only goes to 11, and when I bumped it down it worked great.
Whay had me was that my iPod, but not my MacBook could see it. And my iPod is much smaller/ simpler.