AirPort Extreme Base Station Losing Connection

October 31, 2005 7:45 PM

2 year old AirPort Extreme Base Station is haunted. It keeps dropping our connection to the internet. Computers show in Network Preferences as having an IP and being connected to the internet. This happens every 15-30 minutes.

At first we thought it was the cable modem, but restarting the base station in the Airport Admin Utility fixes it. Tried cold booting the base station, but no luck. Any ideas to save me from having to reboot the thing several times an hour?

posted by will to Technology (6 answers total)

Response by poster: Base station v5.6, btw.
posted by will at 7:47 PM on October 31, 2005

Have you tried a hard reset of the base station? You'll need to reconfigure the base station after a hard reset.
posted by Rothko at 7:51 PM on October 31, 2005

You didn't say what OS version you're running, but Tiger has greatly helped both my connection range and reduced the number of dropouts from my AirPort Extreme Base Station, and it's the same age yours is.

I'm sure I'm stating the obvious here, but make sure you've got the latest firmware and software too.
posted by lambchop1 at 10:11 PM on October 31, 2005

I second the hard reset.
posted by k8t at 3:15 AM on November 1, 2005

Will: I don't have an answer for you, but you are not alone. I have an older Gateway router that has the same problem. I notice it seems to happen most often when I have a lot of simultaneous packet requests (??) -- like when I load a couple of pages at the same time that both have a lot of images; it doesn't just slow down, it cuts out -- if I open a command prompt and try pinging a few sites during the next ~10 minutes, they all time out, despite the fact that ipconfig still shows an active internet connection.

A hard reset on the router does nothing for me.
posted by fourstar at 9:59 AM on November 1, 2005

Do you or a neighbor have a 2.4 Ghz cordless phone?
posted by camworld at 10:39 AM on November 1, 2005