Airport connection dropping off – how to fix it

Boy, can it be frustrating when your wireless network starts dropping every few minutes!

First it works fine, then the traffic stops even though the Airport indicator shows the full signal. When I click on it, the status shows as “Airport: Scanning” then after a few seconds it’s “On” and the traffic goes fine. Minute later it stalls again.

Endless reboots, change from Airport Extreme base station back to my old WGR614 Netgear router, changes and tweaks at both ends, dozens of tips and tricks in different forums, all tried, and nothing helps.


Then a friend of mine suggested to delete a few preference files and the things are working perfectly fine now.

Here is what to do: go to your user preferences folder (~/Library/Preferences) and delete all files containing com.apple.internet… I found only two files – com.apple.internetconfig.plist and com.apple.internetconfigpriv.plist, backed them up and then deleted both.

The wireless connection works like a charm now.

17 comments

  1. i have the exact same problem but when i search my mac none of those files are there =(.

  2. I tried using spotlight to look for these items but couldn’t find them. Then I looked manually, found them, backed them up, deleted them and, at this point my connection seems faster than ever.

  3. THANK YOU!

    I’ve had similar problems, and found a lot of proposed solutions that didn’t work. Yours worked immediately, and my problems have completely disappeared!

    Incidentally, I don’t know if this is the case for everybody, but my problems only occurred when trying to connect to an Airport Extreme base station configured for “802.11n only (5 GHz).” I had no trouble connecting to my base station set for 2.4 GHz.

    – Chuck

  4. why do these files exist in the first place if they only serve to hamper the performance of your connection??

  5. I am having the exact same problem you described above. I did what you said and it still did not fix the problem, so do you have any idea why this did not work for me or is it something I’m missing. I looks up online and this website is the only site that mentioned this problem is there any website I can go check for more info about this situation?

  6. I feel like an idiot, because I don’t know what you all mean by “BACKUP” the files…..? What do I do ?? Where do I back them up to ?? I am a relative noob to Macs, so any help is GREATLY appreciated !

    Tom

  7. I did found the 2 files and deleted them as mentioned above. the internet works perfectly but after a while i found one of the files again in libary/preference/com.apple.internetconfigpriv.plist. i deleted again and the same thing happened over and over .. any help anyone knows what to do please .. thanks

  8. capt sam I have the same problem as you. i keep getting that libary/preference/com.apple.internetconfigpriv.plist. i need help bad. i been letting this go wayyyy too long. can somebody help me out here

  9. To backup is to copy them somwhere safe before you delete them. Backups are no different on Mac than on pc. But there are many ways to do backups on both.

    Deleting the files will cause new to be created. The idea of deleting them in first place is that they become corrupted. They are simply XML files that keeps some settings. So when deleting you normally will need to set up the settings again thus creating new setting files that hopefully are not corrupt.

    Though not all plist files will be recreated automatically, therefore backup before deleting. If deleting them an setting up the network does nothing to fix your problems copy back the originals.

  10. Thanks so much! This was driving me absolutely nuts, as I didn’t know at first if my connection drop-offs were due to Airport or my router/network. After realizing it was Airport’s problem, I tried looking at different website, all with complicated approaches on how to solve this thing. But yours – which was so simple – WORKED! And I’m happy now! Thanks again.

  11. I am have the same problem trying to connect. I followed the instructions for removing the com.apple.internetconfig.plist and com.apple.internetconfigpriv.plist. These files were not found and they were not found when I searched manually.

    Where do I go from here?

  12. Martin, I couldn’t find the files from the original post either, however I am fairly Mac savy and discovered that on some machines, those two files are renamed com.apple.airport.preferences.plist and com.apple.network.identification.plist which are both within [harddrive]/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration

    deleting those two files fixed this problem for me.

  13. This solution worked very well. I am surprised. Thank you!!! Any idea why those files caused the connection on airport to drop so much?

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