Turn off Band Steering in OS X 10.8.x

ImAMacGuy
Valued Contributor II

We've had complaints recently, mostly from the Retina MBP users, about poor wifi connectivity. The AP's logs are showing a Ping-Pong happening - which the vendor tells us is what it does when the machines are switching between 2.4 and 5ghz. It's my understanding that apple has their own band steering (BS?) as well as the AP is doing it's own as well and the two are fighting.

As an additional potential issue to this is the bluetooth. The users are reporting that if they turn off the BT they tend to have a better experience.

Anybody else run into this? Is there a way to turn of BS on osx? I dont want to turn it off at the AP level because it's going to affect a few thousand Dell laptops for the relatively few macs with the issue.

1 REPLY 1

sotnickd
New Contributor

Yes, we discovered this recently also. We're asking both Apple and Aruba (WiFi vendor) what they suggest. For now, since we're a mostly-Mac shop, we've turned off band-steering.

Thanks for your post! It's always helpful to see someone else suffering the same strange unexpected behavior thanks to some Apple update.