Wi-Fi Performance Issues on MacBook Pro

Tech Support
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Hi Everyone! I’m having some weird issues with my Wi-Fi. Lets get the tech stuff out of the way:

Computer: MacBook Pro,14-inch, 2023, M2 Pro Chip, 32GB RAM, Golden Gate 27.0 (Stable)
Router: TP-Link BE9700 Tri-Band Wi-Fi 7 Router

So first off, let me say that this issue is isolated to the computer mentioned above, so I do not think it is a router issue, but I’m open to opinions of why it may be. No other Macs, iPhones or other devices appear to exhibit these issues.

On the MacBook Pro mentioned above the Wi-Fi connection keeps cutting. To be clear, the Mac never indicates that the connection disconnects. I use iStat Menus and the indication that I can see when this occurs is the ping goes from sub-20ms to well over 100+ms, sometimes reaching a ping of 300ms. According to the Mac, I am utilizing my Wi-Fi 6E connection when connecting to my network. This issue causes the network connection to become stale and I cannot access internet or intranet.

Things I have tried:

  • Restarting the computer
  • Disabling AdGuard DNS (this is the only software that I can think of that would affect the network connection)
  • Disabling Private Relay
  • Disabling macOS’ firewall
  • Disabling “Private Wi-Fi Address” / MAC Masking
  • Resetting the DHCP lease

At this point I’m about to do a complete format and reinstallation of macOS 27. I did experience this issue on macOS 26. I’m starting to wonder if this is a hardware issue if the reformatting doesn’t fix it.

Does anyone have any other suggestions on how I can diagnose or fix this issue?

Thanks in advance

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Are you losing connection or just seeing higher ping times?

FYI, ping is the lowest priority packet type and is not a good measure, on its own, of network throughput, only go/no go connectivity.

I would suggest opening a terminal command line and run a continuous ping. See if you get timeouts, not just longer times.

For ping times, under 300ms is still quite normal, I would start worrying if you see 1000ms or longer.

Also, remove DNS “from the loop” by pinging an IP address of a well-known server such as Google’s servers:

ping 8.8.8.8

or similar

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The next test after ping is to do a commandline traceroute to see if you have a failure, where that is happening.

traceroute 8.8.8.8

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If you have more than one local computer, I would do a file transfer tests using the iperf 3 commandline utility.

One computer is the “sender” and one is the “receiver”. By sending a large test file over and over intermittant problems should be easier to see and help determine if an overall network problem or a hardware problem.

iper3 between local computers helps eliminate the Internet and localize the problem to only your own network, too.

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@SpivR Thanks for your reply.

In my original post, I should have mentioned. I was pinging the IP address 1.1.1.1; which is Cloudflare.

In my haste, I reformatted my Mac and the issue seems to be fixed. But thank you for your reply. Traceroute and iperf3 will be on my list if it reoccurs.

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Glad it is working now. FYI, iPerf3 is not a built-in Mac command, but part of homebrew and other open source package managers or can be installed on its own with a shell script.

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Glad it seems to be sorted

If this happens again, I’d run continuous pings to:

  • Your loopback address 127.0.0.1 (should never fail but if it does you have Biiiiiig problems
  • Your local router (your gateway) - This shows how well your local network may be working
  • The DNS server that SprivR says (8.8.8.8) - This shows if a problem is outside your network.

If the first two are behaving and the third isn’t then the problem is outside your network.

Do you have another computer seeing similar problems?

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