After getting my Intel MacBook Pro (2019) force-updated from Monterey to Sonoma a few weeks ago, I noticed lots of stalls and dropouts in my long lived connections (e.g. RDP to a jump system on Azure, Zoom calls, Team calls, etc.). After rebooting all my network gear, the problem persisted. Continuous ping showed periodic (every couple minutes) jumps in latency from the normal 30-40ms to 200ms+ (sometimes 800 ms) and timeouts as well.
I had not experienced this with Monterey. Wifi had been rock solid with Monterey.
Some searching found many reports of the same issue in Ventura and Monterey. It seems to be some bad behavior related to AWDL (a Wifi protocol Apple uses for high speed communication with nearby Apple devices for Handoff and Continuity features, AirPlay, and AirDrop). It seems that AWDL wants to use specific WiFi channels, and when polling for nearby devices will change the laptops radio to use a different Wifi channel, cause dropouts in active WiFi networking.
The best solution seems to be to disable the “awdl0” network interface. But the problem is that it doesn’t stay disabled. The next time macOS wants to search for nearby Apple devices it will reactivate the awdl0 interface and you are back where you started, with an intermittenly unstable Wifi connection.
I’m not sure why Apple hasn’t fixed this. It is really bad.
So there are some solutions out there that involve watching for the awdl0 interface to activate and then immediately taking it down again. I use one of those solutions, a small utility called awdlkiller. And I therefore don’t use AirDrop or AirPlay. My Wifi is reliable again and I can work a full day without any networking stalls.
Here is a reddit thread about this: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/16wbmkp/sonoma_wifi_ping_spikes/
There are many other threads out there on this topic. Some more informative than others, of course. Some folks believe they’ve identified the Wifi channels that Apple wants AWDL to use, and have switched their routers to only offer those channels … after that the latency spikes no longer occur and the awld0 can stay active. However that solution doesn’t work if you don’t have that kind of control over the wifi router, and is also a problem if there is a lot of WiFi interference from nearby routers trying to use the same channel.
If anyone has a better solution to this problem than the “keep deactivating awdl0” solutions referenced in that reddit post, then please let me know!