I’ve installed a Wi-Fi access point and the signal overlaps with the Wi-Fi signal of the access point installed in the router. The access points have the same SSID and password.
This new installation seems to have confused the Mac of one of my housemates. It no longer connects automatically to the network but requires that you manually select the Wi-Fi network and connect. It does have the connect automatically option checked for the SSID of the network.
I would like to get answers/suggestions on what might be the problem on the conceptual level rather than how to fix it in OS X, and if it’s possible to avoid these issues by a different access point setup?
Answer
How strong (quite possibly too strong) are the signals where they overlap?
Turning the power down is a technique that almost never occurs to most people which quite often helps with “overlap” issues. Many weak APs near end use devices make for good WiFi (devices have wimpy antennas and need to talk back to APs) while a few powerful APs blasting away, well, don’t. In quite a few houses 2 is “many” enough from that point of view, but power is higher than it should be.
If the APs are on 2.4 and running 40 MHz bandwidth channels, they are interfering with each other no matter what channels they are on. If running 20 MHz BW, but not using 1, 6, 11, they are interfering (11 channels are 3 – it’s whacky math, but true.)
As Techie007 already mentioned in a comment, an early step here (MacOS specific, just like you didn’t want) is to forget the saved network and then reconnect to it and re-save it.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : TheMeaningfulEngineer , Answer Author : Ecnerwal
