Macbook Pro 13.3" Wifi Issues

I have been running a new late-2009 Macbook Pro since mid-september of this year. It comes with Snow Leopard preinstalled already. It is a pretty amazing machine compared to my two previous laptops, both the Dell Inspiron 700m and the Dell Inspiron 1525. There is a noticeable speed and performance difference. However, this may also be due to the fact that there is a significant hardware upgrade from the old laptops. Anyhow, the transition to the Mac OS-X has been pretty smooth with only occasional bump along the road in the process of getting used to it.

But, back to the point of the article. It seems that since installing the 10.6.1 update there has been intermittent disconnection on the wireless network. This problem has continued on with 10.6.2 update and also with the Airport 002 update from early December of 2009. Anyhow, the intermittent wireless problem is sporadic and is hard to recreate in an form or fashion in order to pin down an actual cause. Well, the actual problem seems to be that the wireless connection is dropped randomly at random intervals. Sometimes wireless can stay connected for only about 5min long while at other times it can last almost a day without dropping the connection. This problem is pretty annoying at times, to say the very least. And it seems like the only way to reconnect to the wireless network is to turn Airport Express off and then back on. One of the more interesting thing to note is that the wireless network status icon report that wireless is still connected with a strong connection, however no internet needing programs will be able to access the web nor am I able to ping the wireless router.

To back up a little bit, I will go and describe a bit of my home network setup. I have indeed played around with this setup in trying to isolate the problem but nothing seems to be able to solve it. My ISP is AT&T. They sold me a Motorola DSL modem, which also handles the ADSL login to AT&T's network. Connected to the modem is a Linksys VPN router, wired only without wireless function. Connected to this Linksys router are my wife's work laptop, my wife's work VoIP phone headset and also a D-Link 624 wireless router. This wireless router is the router that is serving up the wireless connection for my house and my wife's home office. Connected to the wireless router is generally the Wii, iPod Touch and the Macbook Pro; very rarely does my wife connect to the wireless. Aside from the Macbook Pro, all other wireless devices within the house have been able to hold a steady and constant connection with the wireless access point.

Having done some research on the web through Google and also on Apple's Support Forum, it seems like this is a problem that is not widespread enough to garner attention from Apple but enough of a problem that there are numerous sites and forum threads. None of these places seem to have a definite answer or solution to the problem either. Most seems to have only temporary workaround.

Anyhow, to sum up the problem: wireless is dropped sporadically for no noticeable or replicable reasons.

Temporary workaround and solutions that have been found online:

• Cycling Airport Express on/off (possibly annoying for some people)
  
• Using ethernet as much as possible (which kind of just avoids the actual issue)
• Running OnyX, and using the Automation Script to clean up the system (seems to work but the problem tends to come back after a while)
• Deleting the network caches (didn't seem to help, at least for me but seems to have for others)
• Creation of new Network Locations (didn't really seem to have helped for me)
• Disabling of "Ask to join new networks" option in Network properties, Airport's to be exact
• Some found changing to less crowded channel to have helped
• Some also found changing from 802.11N to G or B to G or viceversa to have helped. (I seem to have settled with using on G-only on my wireless network, since I don't have any B equipments and my router does not have N)
• Some have also found that changing from WEP to WPA or WPA to WPA2 or WPA to WPA to have helped (it didn't for me but I have settled on WPA)
• Disabling unused network services seems to have helped for some
• Moving Airport to be the top network service
• Modifying your RTS in your wireless router seems to be able partially produce a more stable connection but this could also potentially affect other computers on your network negatively.
  

There are probably more stuff that I have tried along the way in hope of solving this issue but none have seem to have helped. So does anyone also seem to have this problem or know of a possible solution or workaround?

An interesting note, this issue with the sporadic connection seems to have been only happening when I'm at home. While I am out at a coffeeshop or at my graduate school, everything seems to be running fine and dandy with no sporadic network drops on the wireless. But, at the same time I know it is not an issue with my wireless router since it does not exhibit any problem with any other devices, even laptop from friends coming over.