The Problem

After installing Airport Update 4.2, I opened up Airport Admin Utility and it prompted me to upgrade the firmware on the Airport Extreme Base Station. Thinking that nothing could go wrong, I naively went ahead and installed the firmware upgrade to the Airport Extreme.

Almost immediately after the firmware installation was complete, the wireless network went down. The only way to get the wireless network back was to reset the base station, which ended up as a temporary solution as the wireless network kept dropping every so often (at least once a day). Every time the wireless network went down, a reset of the Airport Extreme Base Station was needed to resurrect the network. On a bad day, the reset wouldn’t even work.

Other symptoms other than the unstable network was that the internet seemed to be slow and lagging. I’m not 100% sure that this has to do with the wireless network, but it’s possible.

The Solution

I found this MacFixItForums.com thread that seemed to have some answers. It looks like it wasn’t the Airport Update 4.2 that’s causing the problem, but the Firmware upgrade that’s messed up the Airport Extreme Base Station, causing the network to become unstable.

The solution was to keep the Airport 4.2 update, but revert the Firmware upgrade to an earlier version.

See this Step by Step Guide to Reverting Airport Firmware.