Fix: Apple’s Mini DisplayPort Wireless Internet Connection Problem

Apple’s newest MacBook Pro models feature a Mini DisplayPort for connecting external monitors. While the new connection is in many ways much better than a full-sized DVI or even DisplayPort, there have been recent reports of problems with wireless internet connections. When connecting an external monitor through the Mini DisplayPort, the Airport wireless signal drops to nothing (or almost nothing).

This is a pretty niche problem, but it’s been eating away at me gradually for the past few weeks, so I did some tinkering and found that by simply switching my router’s wireless channel from “Automatic” to “Manual” and selecting Channel 6, I was able to get full wireless back on my MacBook Pro.

Doing this on an Airport Extreme (or Time Capsule, or Airport Express) is as simple as opening the Airport Utility, going to Manual Setup, and adjusting the Channel setting. Your router will have to restart to apply the settings, but once it’s back up, you should be good to go.

Apple Airport Utility Wireless Settings

For information on accessing Linksys routers, see our previous article about Wireless Security.

Don’t ask me why this works, or why this is even a problem in the first place. Apple hasn’t said anything officially regarding this issue, but it seems to be affecting a number of users.


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Comments

4 responses to “Fix: Apple’s Mini DisplayPort Wireless Internet Connection Problem”

  1. Jeremy_chow Avatar

    This seems to be the fix for the 2.4GHz channel, but I have found additional issues with the 5GHz channel.

    For those that want this to also work with Wireless N or 5GHz, I have found that you must also manually select channel 44.

    It’s still not perfect and the internet has a lot of hesitation still, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it was before.

    Apple – please bring out an official fix!

  2. Joel Baumann Avatar

    Cheers, this helped me a lot with my new Macbook Pro.

  3. rob Avatar
    rob

    Thanks a lot, Brian! Huuuge help!

  4. JL Avatar
    JL

    Thanks a lot! I’ve been having this problem occasionally for a few months now and I just googled your article today and found out it fixes my problem. Do you happen to know, if there’s a fix for this in the latest osx (lion)? Thanks again.

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