Thursday 5 April 2012

5GHz WiFi on your Mac got you down? 802.11d is your problem

Early one stormy morning our house was struck by lightning. Along with a TV, the phone, an ADSL modem and the sensors on our garage door I lost my prized Cisco 1142 wireless access point. My neighbour had it worse. Just about everything electrical was destroyed (his DSL filters were little more than charred remains).

While waiting three weeks for the phone lines in the street to be repaired by Telstra I pondered what I should replace the Cisco with. I had received the Cisco WAP as part of a training course at work. As they cost a fortune buying one was out of the question, but I wanted something comparable with the ability to do channel bonding in the 5GHz range (channel bonding is part of the 802.11n spec that lets you to combine two adjacent non-overlapping 20MHz channels into one 40MHz channel effectively doubling your wireless bandwidth. As there are more non-overlapping channels in the 5GHz band than in the 2.4GHz band and less consumer devices using that band it means less interference and more wifi awesomeness). Given the number of Apple devices in the house I figured I would give Apple's AirPort Extreme a try (plus I could setup Time Capsule backups of my MacBook Pro by connecting an external drive to the USB port on the Extreme as an added bonus even though technically this isn't supported by Apple).

After setting up the Extreme I was suitably impressed with the signal strength and the throughput on the 5GHz band. However, every now and again on wake my MacBook Pro running Lion wouldn't reconnect to the SSID I had setup for the 5GHz band. In fact it couldn't even see the SSID when I would run a Wi-Fi scan using a scanner like iStumbler. The SSID was still visible on my iPad and other devices with 5GHz antennas so I knew the problem was with the MacBook Pro (and possibly Lion) and not the Extreme. Turning the Wi-Fi off and on would result in it being able to be able to reconnect but usually only after a few cycles.

Looking at the logs in the Console utility I noticed something odd. Every time I switched the Wi-Fi off and on I would get messages regarding 802.11d, country codes and a list of supported channels:

5/04/12 8:27:12.000 PM kernel: en1: 802.11d country code set to 'GB'.
5/04/12 8:27:12.000 PM kernel: en1: Supported channels 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 36 40 44 48 52 56 60 64 100 104 108 112 116 120 124 128 132 136 140
5/04/12 8:28:45.000 PM kernel: en1: 802.11d country code set to 'X1'.
5/04/12 8:28:45.000 PM kernel: en1: Supported channels 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 36 40 44 48 52 56 60 64 149 153 157 161 165
5/04/12 8:28:46.000 PM kernel: en1: 802.11d country code set to 'US'.
5/04/12 8:28:46.000 PM kernel: en1: Supported channels 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 36 40 44 48 52 56 60 64 100 104 108 112 116 120 124 128 132 136 140 149 153 157 161 165


The country codes alternated between GB (Great Britain), AU (Australia), US (United States) and X1 each with a different set of supported channels listed (You can see which 5GHz channels are supported in which countries here). According to Wikipedia 802.11d is "is an amendment to the IEEE 802.11 specification that adds support for additional regulatory domains". In other words it's a way for the wireless adapter in your device to simply listen for a beacon that tells it which regulatory domain it's in and then enable only the channels that are allowed in that domain. This makes it a lot easier/cheaper for hardware manufacturers as they only need to make one chipset rather than one for each regulatory domain (In the past you had to purchase a wireless device that was configured for your domain e.g. Japan, Europe, US, etc.). It also means you can take your hardware overseas and shouldn't have any problems.

There is a big problem with this.

Essentially, when the MacBook Pro is waking up it looks around for an 802.11d beacon. This beacon can come from any wireless access point nearby and not just my access point (i.e. any of my neighbours' access points). Once it has found a beacon it simply sets the supported channels in the hardware to match. The problem is my neighbours have their APs set to the wrong domains instead of AU (They're not tech savvy so I know it's not their fault).

Why didn't I experience this problem when I was using the Cisco access point?

I live close to a small airport (not the Apple kind!). When I first installed the Cisco 1142 I had it set to Dynamic Frequency Selection (DFS) for the 5GHz band. This is a scheme that not only tries to select a channel with little interference but also kills broadcasting for a period of time if it detects a radar signal. After I had installed the Cisco and the wireless had shutdown on me a couple of times I clued in to the fact that it was most likely radar from the airport or a plane overhead causing it. Fortunately that radar is in what's called the U-NII Worldwide radio band between 5470 and 5725 MHz or channels 100 and 140. This is a chunk of spectrum roughly in the middle of the 5GHz band used by wireless devices so I simply set the Cisco to use one of the channels below the U-NII radar band such as 40 and never looked back.

Turns out channel 40 is in all regulatory domains except China so it didn't matter which 802.11d beacon the MacBook Pro picked up as channel 40 was always supported and I was oblivious to any problem. Remembering the issues I had with radar shutting down the Cisco WAP, when I setup the AirPort Extreme I made sure I set it on a fixed 5GHz channel only this time I chose channel 149 which is above the U-NII radar band. Turns out channel 149 isn't useable in Europe, Turkey, Israel and South Africa so when the MacBook Pro was picking up a Great Britain 802.11d beacon it was switching off that channel in the MacBook Pro's hardware and that's why I couldn't reconnect to wireless.

I've now set it to channel 36 on the Airport Extreme and it's all good. That is until everybody else nearby tries to crowd into the same channel space with their access points...



Now off to my neighbours to fix the country codes in their access points!

17 comments:

  1. Handy article, some solid investigation going on there :-)

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  2. Thank you for writing this. You've just helped me reconnect to my 5GHz network on my Airport Express. It appears one of my neighbours has their AP set to 'Germany' :-(

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  3. Thanks for your investigation on this mate.
    Really helped.

    My Mini froze, I shut it down and restarted it only to find out that the 5Ghz went to shit, did not work.
    Changed the channel and wholaaa - it works like old again.

    Thanks again.
    Tom
    thomasjhunt.500px.com

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  4. Hey Guys,

    Need help - hv the same issue.

    However I hv an Asus router. RT-n56u.
    But my macbookpro, everytime it comes back from Sleep, doesnt see the network SSID. in my case 2.4 Ghz becomes invisible. And 5 GHz is visible always, but never connects.

    Its just Mac book pros that do this. Other devices iPhones, iPads, Printers, Samsung phones, tablets, a windows computer - all is OK, they work each time

    my MBP is 2011 April. And 10.7.4 is OSx version (Lion).
    Another is MBP 2009 Aug. And 10.6 version (Snow Leopard)

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    Replies
    1. Try downloading a wireless stumbler like iStumbler (http://istumbler.net/). It will show you the signal strength of each SSID and the channel number. It should also show any nearby networks and their channel numbers as well. Try changing the settings on the router to put the 2.4GHz on a channel number that isn't being used by one of the surrounding networks. Also try changing the security setting to "WPA2-PSK with AES encryption" as Macs generally work better with that setting.

      You could also try updating the firmware on the ASUS router but you will probably need a PC to that. Details here: http://www.asus.com.au/Networks/Wireless_Routers/RTN56U/#download

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  5. Awesome findinds indeed!

    One question tho: what if I have many conflicting country codes around that do not share a common channel range?

    Is there a way to disable the 802.11d beacon search and force a single country code on the mac?

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    Replies
    1. Unfortunately I think you would be out of luck.

      I wish there was a way to disable the beacon search (and believe me I looked to see if this was possible).

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    2. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. For what it's worth, I had no connection with iMac to web. Very frustrated. Played with network settings. Called it a nigh and went to put computer to sleep but accidentally hit the location button. It had changed the default location to today's date and time- I reset this to automatic and Internet came back to life. Don't know how or why and don't care, but obviously when putting to sleep previously this setting was changed and irrespective of what I did in network settings it turned off web access.

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  7. I am also having this problem. Changing my 5GHZ channel from 149 to 44 or 48 was the only way I can stay connected to the 5GHZ channel after waking my Macbook Pro from Sleep mode. Id much prefer to stay on 149 as it is a stronger signal. I have reported the issue to Apple and suggest everyone else with this problem do the same. Power in numbers.

    http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

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  8. I have a mid 2011 iMac, and a belkin n600 router. I am unable to connect to the 5Ghz network. My router only has channels 149,153,157 and 161. I am from India. Do you have any suggestions on what to do? Any help would be most appreciated.

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  9. Fantastic! You have saved me from a lot of frustration. Great post.

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  10. THANK YOU! I'm with the others... I was baffled. Why can't Apple communicate this stuff?!?

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  11. Thank you very much..........every one be capable of easily understand it,
    Asus Technical Support

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  12. Otterfish, I just switched from Verizon internet to Time/Warner internet with an Arris wireless router/modem and couldn't connect to the 5Ghz wireless network channel. I came across your blog and then immediately went to the router and changed the 5Ghz to channel 149. I now can connect to the 5Ghz where before, it would show up but when I tried to connect, it would tell me to move closer to the router. Thank you very much, 3 1/2 years after you wrote the blog.

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  13. Great fix - it appears that some Linksys routers (WRT1200AC) can't actually be set to anything lower than 149 though - even though channels such as 36 and 40 are availble in the admin UI, the router will not actually broadcast on those channels. I have a feeling without DFS, you might not be allowed to broadcast on those channels and Linksys have disable them in AU whilst keeping the menu option there. This is painful for me as I now cannot connect my UK macbook to the linksys WRT120AC router, in Australia, using the 5GZH wifi network.

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  14. Brilliant. Have been struggling with this for a few months after getting a new router.

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