This post is a public service to those of us who have had enough with Microsoft and are starting to integrate Macs into our home wireless networks. A little something you need to know…
If you’re a good boy or girl and you secure your wireless network, you have a host of choices for security protocol. WEP is labeled as "ensuring maximum interoperability" by the network vendors, but it’s an old standard…and evidently prone to weirdness happening that’s hard to diagnose.
The problem occurred for me when my Macs started getting "confused" on the network and started looking like the router was dropping out intermittently. I tried a bunch of things, talking to my DSL provider, changing routers, trying an all-in-one router, etc. but nothing seemed to work. I finally did a detailed Google search and found the issue.
Evidently, Apple does not process ASCII network keys in the same way that everyone else does when using WEP encryption in wireless networks. So, if you want to have it work, you either abandon WEP for a newer protocol like WPA2, or you shorten your encryption key to 13 characters or less. Now, there’s an Apple bulletin out on this that kind of hints at the issue…
AirPort, Time Capsule: Joining an encrypted wireless network
The question I have for Apple is, How would I find this? The confusion to me is that WEP is advertised as "ensuring maximum interoperability," but it doesn’t mean "between operating systems." It really means "over time".
Anyway, I changed all of my equipment to WPA2, and it works fine now. Thankfully, all of my computers support WPA2, or else I’d be hosed…fortunately, I’m just out about three weeks of troubleshooting and a lot of frustration…
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