[Polo2883]

Has anyone else noticed a drop in airport extreme signal after the new airport update. My signal has dropped dramatically in some places. I use to be able to get full signal next to my router and now i get 4 bars instead of 5. In other places where i get 4 bars i now get 0-2 bars. Whats going on.

[TAZ]

Someone reported the same "feature" on a mailing list I belong to. The stated solution was to reset WEP to 40 bit and then to 128 bit. Dont know how the 2 are related as I havent had the issue come up yet,

[Polo2883]

since there is only like 10 people in campus with Mac laptops the school is not going to do that. I have no idea why its happening. I am considering a reformat and not doing the airport update.

[ibook_steve]

Have you even read any of the news pages? MacNN, Macfixit, Macintouch, XLR8yourmac, everbody has mentioned this. The best solution at this point is the downgrade to the previous version of Airport. Most of those pages have instructions for doing this.

Steve

[Tomster]

How many here have updated the base station as well as the software? I have definitely lost signal strength with this update - yet I am still able to pick up my neighbor's linksys router from across the street. Makes me think it is the 5.4 base station update.

[KraziKid]

I updated AirPort Extreme to 3.4, and my AirPort Extreme Base Station to 5.4, and I noticed no problems. Signal and speed are both the same as before, if not better.

[bkb]

The signal strength appears to be lower - in other words, the Airport menulet has lost 2 bars and AP Grapher has lost 15-20% after the update, however, the general quality of the signal is no different. If I were you guys, I would test the quality of your connection out first to see if there is any difference, before downgrading. I have noticed no such difference in the general quality of my connection.

[Tomster]

There are two issues here. Signal quality and signal strength. Surfing the net will not reveal the limits of your signal quality unless one has a T3 running into the house. The average person can have the multicast rate set to 1 and not worry about maxing out the connection. The only way to test signal quality is to crank up the multicast rate and see how fast one can send files from one computer to another on the lan.

The issue people are experiencing is signal strength. Losing 15-20 percent and a bar or two of signal is not a big deal if one had four bars of signal. The problem is that some people use to have two bars of signal in the bedroom which subsequently dropped to zero. Parts of the home and office which used to have coverage are now dead zones. Hopefully this will be addressed in an update pretty soon.

[KraziKid]

You know what I just noticed? It seems the menulet is giving the wrong reading. I have just movied far away from my base station, and while the menu icon reports 1 bar, if you open Internet Connect, it shows around half or so.