I just spent the last week diagnosing catastrophic Wi-Fi issues at a client location.
90% of macs wouldn’t connect to Wi-Fi, when they would association would take 45 seconds. Sometimes you couldn’t route or ping the gateway.
When you could you’d get disassociated within a minute. Turning off the airdrop/anirplay interface fixes it instantly.
sudo ifconfig awdl0 down
It took us 5 days to figure it out. We had no less than a dozen professionals on it. Each with at least a decade of experience. We combed the Wi-Fi and network config repeatedly to figure out what we did wrong. (It wasn’t till we had the hint that it was client side that we sniffed the nic to see the packet of death)
So I’m going to respectfully disagree. Articles like this are important. If I’d seen this last Monday it’d have saved me a week of hell and saved my client a week of vastly diminished productivity. Not to mention the tens of thousands of dollars spent diagnosing it and the millions of dollars of lost revenue from the deals they couldn’t close because calls kept dropping in the office (because enough people were on hotspots to saturate cell service in the area)
Information is important, but this post didn't have enough technical information about how to tell if this is your problem. How many people would say they haven't experienced “slow internet connection” or “drops in Zoom calls”? “entirely losing a WiFi connection” is less common but does that mean “it happened once and then it came back” or something like the hell you're describing.
That's important for the reasons the person you're responding to mentioned. I too have seen many problems caused by this kind of thing where someone had something they didn't like, made a ton of low-level config changes based on random blog posts, and then forgot about that when it broke something else.
We’ve seen this repeatedly across different types of spaces and have had teams spend similar amounts of time to get to know what’s going on underneath.
It took us 5 days to figure it out. We had no less than a dozen professionals on it. Each with at least a decade of experience. We combed the Wi-Fi and network config repeatedly to figure out what we did wrong. (It wasn’t till we had the hint that it was client side that we sniffed the nic to see the packet of death)
So I’m going to respectfully disagree. Articles like this are important. If I’d seen this last Monday it’d have saved me a week of hell and saved my client a week of vastly diminished productivity. Not to mention the tens of thousands of dollars spent diagnosing it and the millions of dollars of lost revenue from the deals they couldn’t close because calls kept dropping in the office (because enough people were on hotspots to saturate cell service in the area)