What can be done to make my Mountain Lion Mac drops connection to my Cisco router less often?

Solution 1:

The beacon loss event is the key. Your wireless card lost contact with the router and gave up.

wl0: Beacon Loss Event

If you can, change your beaconing rate on the router to be faster (and slower - sometimes the opposite of the intuitive thing is the answer). Also you should run the Wi-Fi Diagnostics tool which resides in /System/Library/CoreServices and monitor the performance of your setup. This will let you see the signal and noise so you can pick a channel on the router that loses the beacon the least often. There is a lot of data here, but the most important number is the txRate. It is how well your radio can talk to the router radio. All other measures end up reflected here. If you have bad signal, or bad noise, this goes down. The higher you can get the transmit speed, the less likely you will lose the beacon.

It could be just that the Mac hardware doesn't like the beacon pattern of that router and in the end you pick up an Apple router (or another one) - but you should be able to try some more things and perhaps make this better.

Ignore the sandboxing errors - sandboxing would prevent all operation, all the time and not lead to an intermittent failure.

Solution 2:

I'm not sure this thread is still active or not but thought I'd put in my experience and research as this came up on a search for solutions. I'm not a power user and yet I'd like a shot at answering this question. The answer I have is: "Nothing can be done." I have had a Cisco Valet M10 - not a power router but all I need - which has worked wonderfully to link my MacBook Pro (late 2011), printer (HP Deskjet Wireless 8500 All-in-one) and a small, mini HP (Windows 7) until I upgraded to Mountain Lion. It also works great with my iPhone 4S running v. 6.2. I just chatted with Linksys and was told that their technicians are working on upgrading to Mountain Lion but had no product at present that works with that OS. Well, here's what happens to me. First, it bumps my printer off-line and I cannot get it to connect. I go to the printer and reconnect to the router then just as soon as I try to print, the printer goes off-line. I don't use the little mini PC so don't worry about it. On my computer itself I keep being bumped off as well. I go up to the wireless icon at the top toolbar and when I left-click on it, it says it's searching for a network. I click on mine and it says it's on and I can work on-line for awhile before it kicks me off again. It's usually when I try to go to a new tab or website. Eventually, Safari just gives up and freezes. I'm not sure Apple gave out to peripheral vendors the specs nor gave them enough time to adjust, but that is simply my opinion. That statement however, I feel is justified because there are so many programs and apps that I use that do not have an upgrade to work with Mountain Lion. I, too, wonder if I should go back to a Windows-based computer. But I've spent way too much money on changing to a Mac in terms of programs for Macs, etc. Think I will try my little mini PC and see what happens there.