Modus Operandi

I’ve been having trouble with my home wireless network. The AirPort (EXTREME!!!) Base Station periodically refuses to connect me to the internet. I get full bars but no web. I factory reset my Base Station and renamed the network in the process. This seems to have ironed out the original problem, but it created a new one. Whenever I woke my MacBook from sleep it would take ~30 seconds to acquire the network. Argh.

The solution turned out to be pretty simple. The new network name got tacked onto the end of my Preferred Networks list in the Network>AirPort Preference Pane (the Advanced… button in the lower right as of 10.5.6). Moving it to the top immediately eliminated the delay in connecting for me. Yay!

I couldn’t figure out why this worked until I took another look at the list. It was seeded with a few named “default,” “linksys,” and “belkin54g.” I imagine that the MacBook was recognizing identically named networks and spending time trying to negotiate a connection with them.

It’s pretty simple, but maybe this will help someone else who is as frustrated as I was.

Also, name your wireless networks!