Strange anomaly with wireless-N; has anyone else experienced this???

Question

Hi all, I purchased a 15" MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo back in February and therefore decided to upgrade to a new router supporting the N-draft standard when my two and a half year old Airport Express decided to die. I know that the claimed 5X increase on speed may not be fully realized as of yet, but the increased range is of huge benefit to me as I tend to use my laptop rather far away from the router; not to mention that the walls in my house are made of solid concrete. My local Best Buy (unfortunately there's no actual Apple Store within an hour of me) was out of Airport Extreme Base Stations so I therefore went with the Linksys WRT300N, as I'd heard good things about Linksys in the past and this was the only wireless-N router they had out at the time. Making a long story short, I was able to set up the router with my cable modem just fine, and make a successful connection with the MBP after purchasing the enabler from Apple. However, I recognized soon after this that my laptop began exhibiting behavior that it never even once had; sporadic freezes occurring at least three times a day. Baffled I tried (in order) various restarts, repairing of disk permissions, running maintenance scripts, clearing the NVRAM and PRAM (totally unrelated I know, but I just wanted to cover all bases possible), and lastly reinstalling Mac OS X; nothing made a difference. Finally it dawned upon me that this may be a problem with the new router, so I configured it to only broadcast a G wireless signal (before I had it set to only broadcast N, to take full use of the increased range/speed of the new standard) and have not experienced a freeze on my machine since. Of course it's just a bummer that now my airport signal strength fluctuates between only 1 and 2 bars (I was getting the full 4, before) and speed is down as well (I max out at about 2.5mbps, while before I was easily getting the full rated speed of my connection, which is 10mbps). Anywho, I'm just wondering if anyone else has experience a similar problem in using Wireless-N routers and if there are any work arounds for it. If not I guess I'll just be stuck using the G standard on my $150 N router... Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I have this exact same problem, but it just seems to be a problem isolated within non Airport Extreme routers (including WRT300N, WRT350N, etc etc).
If you don't want to limit yourself to just using G broadcast mode on the router and want to simply remove the N enabler, go here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=4055609&#4055609
Awesome post and extremely useful. I myself have a WRT300N but just purchased an Airport Extreme in hopes of getting this to work!