External monitor versus wifi (11 Jan 2015)

Whenever I connect an external monitor to my MacBook Pro via a Thunderbolt/DVI adapter, the Mac loses its wifi connection. Huh?

My setup: A MacBook Pro 2013 model with Retina display, a Thunderbolt/DVI adapter hooked up to an external old Dell monitor. The Mac has a stable wifi connection - until I plug in the DVI adapter.

This problem annoyed me for quite some time, up to the point I did not even use the external monitor anymore. Today, it happened to me again, and I decided to finally try and tackle the issue.

I found this discussion titled "My wifi drops when I plug in an external monitor through the thunderbolt port". In this discussion, a workaround is suggested - which is changing the wifi channel!

And indeed, this helped! Before, my router was using channel 4. I reconfigured the router to select an appropriate channel automatically, and now it is on channel 1, as confirmed by the Wireless Diagnostics tool.

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