AWDL Was Killing My MacBook Wi-Fi

A few days ago, I noticed that pages were opening painfully slowly on my MacBook Pro. Downloads were even worse, sometimes dropping to speeds measured in kilobytes.

It had happened occasionally before, so I had never paid much attention to it. I also don’t download large files regularly on this Mac, which made it easier to ignore.

But this time, browsing had become so slow that I couldn’t ignore it anymore.

My internet and Wi-Fi setup

I have a 200 Mbps internet plan.

The main router provided by my ISP supports the full bandwidth. However, the router in my room is connected to the main router on the ground floor through a LAN cable, and that older router could deliver a maximum of around 100 Mbps over my Wi-Fi setup.

I also have a Windows PC, and several other people in the house use the connection, so I continued with the 200 Mbps plan instead of downgrading it.

Besides, 100 Mbps was already more than enough for most of the work I do on my MacBook Pro. Whenever I ran a speed test, I usually got somewhere between 70 Mbps and 90 Mbps.

But the lag I experienced this time was impossible to ignore.

When I opened fast.com, the speed barely reached 15 to 20 Mbps, and the latency was unusually high.

My first assumption was that the ISP was having a temporary issue. That happens occasionally and usually fixes itself within a few minutes.

This time, it didn’t.

The problem continued even after restarting my MacBook. I hardly ever shut it down completely, but I had done so that day for some reason. After starting it again, the Wi-Fi was unbelievably slow.

Every other device was working perfectly

I checked the connection on my other devices.

My iPad crossed 100 Mbps without any issue.
My iPhone loaded pages instantly.
My Windows PC, connected directly through LAN, reached the full 200 Mbps.
The MacBook continued struggling with high latency and terrible download speeds.

I then connected the LAN cable directly to my MacBook using an adapter.

The speed immediately jumped to 200 Mbps.

Okay, so the internet connection itself was clearly fine. The problem was limited to Wi-Fi on the MacBook.

Maybe one of my new tools was causing it

I had recently installed a few new AI development tools and services while experimenting with my agentic workflows.

I thought one of them might be downloading something in the background or consuming network resources, so I shut them all down.

In fact, I killed almost everything running on my MacBook.

That made zero difference.

I started troubleshooting with Codex. It suggested that the old router might be the problem. That sounded believable because the router was old and already limited to around 100 Mbps.

So I immediately ordered another router (ASUS RT-AX53U).

It cost me around ₹5500.

Thanks to Amazon’s same-day delivery, the router arrived within a few hours. I set it up, connected the MacBook, and ran another test.

The Wi-Fi was still slow.

At this point, I was incredibly frustrated. I had made a rash buying decision and spent ₹5500 on a new router, only to discover that the router wasn’t the actual problem.

Naturally, I went back to Codex and cursed it for convincing me to buy something I didn’t need.

After a lot of apologies from Codex, I forgave it and threatened it to either find the solution or I cancel its subscription. It worked lol.

It suggested temporarily disabling the awdl0 network interface.

I ran:

sudo ifconfig awdl0 down

And just like that, the Wi-Fi started working properly.

The culprit was AWDL

The culprit turned out to be AWDL (Apple Wireless Direct Link).

AWDL is Apple’s proprietary peer-to-peer Wi-Fi technology. It allows nearby Apple devices to discover and communicate with each other directly without sending that traffic through the local Wi-Fi router.

It is used by several Apple ecosystem features, including:

AirDrop
AirPlay
Universal Control
Handoff
Sidecar
Continuity Camera

On macOS, AWDL appears as a virtual network interface named awdl0.

The problem is that the Mac’s Wi-Fi hardware may need to temporarily move away from the router’s channel to listen for nearby AWDL devices.

AWDL commonly uses social channels such as channel 6 on 2.4 GHz and channels 44 or 149 on 5 GHz. If the router is operating on a different channel, the Wi-Fi radio may periodically spend time away from the router’s channel to check for nearby Apple devices.

Depending on the Mac, router, channel configuration, interference, and nearby devices, this can result in:

Latency spikes: Ping times may suddenly jump every few seconds.
Packet loss: Some packets may be delayed or dropped while the radio is off-channel.
Reduced throughput: Downloads and web requests may stall while traffic waits.
Inconsistent performance: The connection may appear fast one moment and unusable the next.

This does not mean every Mac or Apple device will experience the same problem. In my case, the iPad and iPhone were completely fine, while the MacBook was badly affected.

Confirming that AWDL was responsible

After disabling awdl0, I ran another test on fast.com.

You can also test the connection using macOS’s built-in network-quality command:

networkQuality

My Wi-Fi speed immediately returned to ~90 Mbps, which was the maximum my old room router could provide.

Wow.

To confirm that AWDL was actually causing the problem, I turned the interface back on:

sudo ifconfig awdl0 up

The speed dropped again.

At first, it went down to around ~40 Mbps. Within a few minutes, downloads were back to kilobytes per second.

That was enough confirmation for me.

Why I couldn’t permanently disable AWDL

Codex suggested running a script at startup to keep awdl0 disabled.

But I couldn’t do that.

I use AirDrop regularly. Disabling AWDL permanently would also interfere with other Apple ecosystem features I use, so it wasn’t a practical solution.

My temporary backup plan was to disable AWDL whenever I needed stable Wi-Fi and enable it again whenever I wanted to use AirDrop.

I kept these aliases ready for my ~/.zshrc file:

# Disable AWDL for more stable Wi-Fi
alias hi-ad="sudo ifconfig awdl0 down"

# Restore AWDL for AirDrop, AirPlay, and Continuity features
alias bye-ad="sudo ifconfig awdl0 up"

After adding them, I could run:

hi-ad

to disable AWDL, and:

bye-ad

to bring it back.

It worked, but manually switching AWDL on and off was obviously not an ideal long-term solution.

The better fix was in my router settings

After looking into the problem further, I found a much better solution for my setup.

Instead of disabling AWDL, I changed the channel used by my 5 GHz Wi-Fi network.

Both of my routers had their 5 GHz channel set to Auto. In my case, the router had selected channel 44.

I opened the router’s 5 GHz Wi-Fi settings and manually changed the channel to 149, which is one of the channels AWDL can use.

I saved the settings, restarted the Wi-Fi, and tested the connection again.

It worked.

The repeated latency spikes disappeared, and my MacBook was finally able to use the full 200 Mbps connection through the new router.

The basic process was:

Open the router’s administration page.
Go to the 5 GHz wireless settings.
Find the Wi-Fi channel option.
Change it from Auto to 149.
Save the settings and restart the router.
Test the connection again using fast.com or run networkQuality in your Macbook terminal.

Channel 149 fixed the problem in my setup, but it may not be available on every router or in every region. Some devices and regions may work better with channel 44 or another supported channel.

So don’t blindly copy the number. Test the available channels and compare the latency and packet loss on your own network.

At least the new router wasn’t completely wasted

It turns out that my old router was technically fine. I didn’t need to buy a new one just to solve the AWDL problem.

However, I don’t completely regret the purchase.

The old router limited my Wi-Fi speed to around 100 Mbps. With the new one, I can use the full 200 Mbps connection on my MacBook.

It could also comfortably handle a 500 Mbps connection. I previously had a 500 Mbps plan but downgraded it because I couldn’t use that speed on my main device.

So, even though I bought the router for the wrong reason, the upgrade still turned out to be useful.

Everything happens for a reason, you know.