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Since I’ve had my MacBook I’ve always noticed incredibly poor performance on WiFi when I’m on battery.

It’s so poor that Adium can’t even maintain a connection to any IM service, it starts to lag and messages don’t get delivered. Web pages only half load, videos stop 20% through, etc. The connection just does not sustain when it’s on battery.

I finally took the time to search google and see what I could find. It appears the issue plagues most MacBook’s that were manufactured before week 36 of the MacBook production cycle.

I found miscellaneous workarounds that included hiding your SSID, turning off your routers encryption and using an ACL instead. This isn’t really an option for me, I have people who use my wifi when they come over and setting them up with an ACL would be a huge pain in the ass. Another option was switching the router channel to something other then 6, unfortunately, my router doesn’t let me.

I then came across this fix, basically, it constantly pings a domain (google in my case) so airport never has the option to idle. Of course, this is going to drain your battery much faster, but for me, I’d rather have lower battery life and actually use the internet, then have fantastic battery life with no internet.

You’re supposed to enter the command into Terminal:
nohup ping -i 1 google.com > /dev/null &

This isn’t exactly ideal for me, I don’t want to type that everytime. So I came up with something else:

In terminal:
touch ~/.bash_profile
open -e ~/.bash_profile
Note: The first line is only necessary if you’ve never modified your bash_profile before.

This will open the contents of .bash_profile in TextEdit, append the following two lines to it:
alias airport_on='nohup ping -i 1 google.com > /dev/null &'
alias airport_off='killall ping'

Save, and then close. Back in terminal run:
source ~/.bash_profile

Now you can simply run “airport_on” to turn the idle-prevention on, and then “airport_off” to turn it off.

Hope this helps, if not, at least I have it written down for the next time I reinstall.