Pandora Wi-Fi On 350kilobytes/s

[hch]

ah, hardware after all. great that you found it.

too bad just that i won't get the little wifi thingie and a chance to solder the board myself; would have loved that

 

[Awakening]

350 kB/s roughly equals 2.8 Mb/s, the broadband in my flat is capable of 76 Mb/s.

I wonder what kind of speed would be required to stream a 480p movie from my computer, this is something I really want to be able to do with my Pandora.

A 1 hour SD video is, let's say, 700MB.
700MB = 716800KB
716800KB/350KB/s = 2048s =~ 34 minutes. You could download a 1 hour SD video in 34 minutes.
In one hour, you could download a 1.2 gig file. More or less. Got to account for instability, and that 350KB/s is through his internet connection, so who knows what it actually is on a local server. Provided it is at least as good on a local server as through the internet, you should have no problem streaming reasonably encoded SD video.

Thanks for the calculation, that looks good enough for me. For instantly moving large files I will probably just move the SD card.

350 kB/s roughly equals 2.8 Mb/s, the broadband in my flat is capable of 76 Mb/s.

what kind of connection is that? oc1 is 50Mbps oc3 is 150Mbps I'm not familiar with anything in between.... and how much does that cost? Our company pays about 15k a month on our oc3 connection.

How many people are in your building? I just find this hard to believe, not calling you a lair.. I'm just very curious... might save us some money

I pay for "up to" 100 Mb/s and I ran a program that tested my connection to be about 76 Mb/s down and 36 Mb/s up, and I believe there are 48 apartments in this building. I'm paying about $50 a month, there are cheaper options. These kinds of speeds are pretty common for those who can plug a TP cable right into a wall socket, most providers offers up to 2 Mb/s or up to 100 Mb/s. Sweden have if not the best then one of the worlds best Internet networks. We are talking miles and miles of optical fiber cable here, covering most of the country.

 

[Fzero]

What would people take as a minimum speed?

"one million bytes!"

I will trust the judgements of other posts and agree this is enough for me.
I wasn't even considering downloading iso and films, thought just about web browsing really so sounds like will match my iPhone in terms of that so I'm happy

well done MWeston and OPTeam

sounds to me like even us later first batchers will soon be opening the box, sweeeeeet

 

[mali]

ah, hardware after all. great that you found it.

too bad just that i won't get the little wifi thingie and a chance to solder the board myself; would have loved that

Why not let the driver stay in the kernel and offer those dongles in the shop for a few bucks?

 

[tokyosky]

I have a 100mbit hikari line here in Tokyo and my girlfriend has a 1000mbit KDDI One.
It would be nice if the Pandora could make use of this kind of bandwidth, but
I personally dont care about the speed so much, since i can transfer everything i need
via SD-Card.

 

[torpor]

This is really great news, I'm glad you guys found the issue and I'm really looking forward to hearing that the cases have arrived and that manufacturing has started! Nice news, team!

 

[fusion_power]

I would be glad if we can get a new time-scedule now. When do the first cases and the first boards arrive England? When starts assembling? When is everything shipped and arrives at the customers? When starts production of the rest of the cases and Boards? Very important questions at least for me . I hope, the major stuff is done this week so that we don't wait forever again cause we already waiting forever.

 

[SNESFAN]

I pay for "up to" 100 Mb/s and I ran a program that tested my connection to be about 76 Mb/s down and 36 Mb/s up, and I believe there are 48 apartments in this building. I'm paying about $50 a month, there are cheaper options. These kinds of speeds are pretty common for those who can plug a TP cable right into a wall socket, most providers offers up to 2 Mb/s or up to 100 Mb/s. Sweden have if not the best then one of the worlds best Internet networks. We are talking miles and miles of optical fiber cable here, covering most of the country.

I understand Sweden has some kick ass networks, I hear great things. I'm just curious about what kind of backbone technology is it using. I still don't know what optical comms standard gets 100Mb/s

A E4 line would get you 140Mb/s roundabouts no idea how much that would cost, but at $50 x 50 is about roughly $2500 a month. A t-3 line costs about 5k a month and offers about 40Mb/s

EDIT: we got fiber cable running most our contry as well on the backbone, just not to end users, only major nodes and those who pay out the ass for it. But it's there to be had if you wanna pay for it.

see this crap lol this is what 15k a month will buy you

but mind you we got about oh... I don't know 5000+ people on it, and numerous firewalls and whatnot between us and the outside.

 

[Mithrildor]

I just hope Im still getting my dongle. 350 KBps is not enough and if this was already a hardware fault then there has to be one more capping the chip at 1/2 of its speed (700KBps is possible). I need to be able to use my 30Mbps internet connection.


I just hope this isnt one of the many hardware mistakes.

 

[Alpha2]

Right now Speakeasy.net speedtest says my laptop on low grade Verizon ADSL broadband via Wifi says I'm getting an average of

Download Speed: 738 kbps (92.3 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 134 kbps (16.8 KB/sec transfer rate)

(I believe the stock rating for this line is supposed to be like 750 kbps down and 156 kbps up)

I would KILL to get 350KB/s

You know, when ED said that the dongle uses less power than the onboard wifi I thought that sounded weirdly inefficient. Like why would the build in bits use so much power and not be able to get up to speed? Anyway, so the Boards that have already been tested will be fixed by adding a new resistor which should be a quick minute-per-board fix which will then be immediately sent out as they're all finished. Is the process to remove and replace the resistor or is it something that's just being added to what's already there to fix the issue?

 

[WizardStan]

I have a 100mbit hikari line here in Tokyo and my girlfriend has a 1000mbit KDDI One.
It would be nice if the Pandora could make use of this kind of bandwidth

The Pandora will NEVER be able to take full advantage of these speeds, even in the absolute perfect conditions.
The 802.11g standard has a max of 54mbit. This is not a limit of the Pandora, but of ALL wireless g cards and routers. So even under the absolute best possible conditions, you are limited by the laws of physics to about half your speed, and about 1/20th your girlfriends speed by virtue of it being a wireless transmission instead of wired. You have a ridiculous fast connection, your girlfriend even more so.
The new 802.11n standard that is coming out will allow for up to 600mbit, but that's still fairly new. I think the spec was only officially standardized last year.

 

[trooper]

I would definitely be interested in purchasing 1 or 2 of those diddy usb wifi dongles.

I have a few systems around here that could use them.

Craig, Please make a few of them available as a purchasable option, Especially since
we also know them to be compatible with the Pandora too.

Trooper

 

[mali]

Is the process to remove and replace the resistor or is it something that's just being added to what's already there to fix the issue?

Another resistor is added on top, check the quotes thread.

I just hope Im still getting my dongle. 350 KBps is not enough and if this was already a hardware fault then there has to be one more capping the chip at 1/2 of its speed (700KBps is possible). I need to be able to use my 30Mbps internet connection.


I just hope this isnt one of the many hardware mistakes.

The way I interpret the situation, MWeston just found the problem, did a quick test without proper setup(just did some browsing) and went to bed. Chances are, that they'll improve it further so that you may get full speed when the device is delivered.

 

[Ollonk]

I pay for "up to" 100 Mb/s and I ran a program that tested my connection to be about 76 Mb/s down and 36 Mb/s up, and I believe there are 48 apartments in this building. I'm paying about $50 a month, there are cheaper options. These kinds of speeds are pretty common for those who can plug a TP cable right into a wall socket, most providers offers up to 2 Mb/s or up to 100 Mb/s. Sweden have if not the best then one of the worlds best Internet networks. We are talking miles and miles of optical fiber cable here, covering most of the country.

I envy you. 512kb costs $25/month here. The best package offered is 15mbit, which costs $200/month. The only other options are satellite or cellular.

 

[Alpha2]

Thanks Mali, I read the whole thread I just wanted clarification on that particular part.

 

[xyta]

Great news!

I hope that replacing that resistor will be the only hardware fix. And I assume that this is an solid fix, and not a cheap workaround like overclocking a misprogrammed module...?

350 KB is a very good result!

The 54 MBit/s of G wifi are only a very theoretical marketing value. From experience you can be glad to get 16 to 20 MBit on an ordinary laptop!

In that blog:
http://greekclaud.blogspot.com/2009_08_01_archive.html

...700-800 KB/s were archived using an Bb and a TI WL1251. Taking that confirmed reference value into account, the devs made a huge progress from 1% to 50% of that maximum testified bandwith. Congratulations!

Now we can speculate if that 700 kB/S are possible at all and about what prevents the Pandora from reaching that bandwith upto now. Perhaps the missing 50% are already there and the 50% originate from the limited bandwith of MWeston's internet access. In that blog, the 700 KB/s were measurements using Iperf http://sourceforge.net/projects/iperf/
(but I don't know where to get an ARM version)

Nevertheless, 350KB are a great progress and enough for most www stuff. The maximum SDHC capacity is 64 GB, so the Pandora is not really suitable to be used as a download machine for TBs of data. If you're plannig to do that anyway, you should buy an USB LAN adapter and an external HDD....

 

[meltingice]

I can't believe how slow and expensive internet is in some areas (then again, now that I think about it, maybe I can believe it). I'm in the middle of Massachusetts and we pay about $60/month for 20Mbps internet. Glad the wireless was fixed so I'll be able to take advantage of these speeds on the Pandora!

 

[Vitel]

"Speedtest.net requires at least version 8 of Flash."

 

[carlgeorge]

I, for one, am very pleased with this news. The problem has potentially being found and that's more than half the battle.

I know everyone is entitled to their opinions, but don't forget that MWeston is an Electrical Engineer and knows what he is doing. The Pandora is his baby and he will do his best to fix it. All these 'experts' whining and giving 'advice' is really getting tedious. Give the man a chance to finish investigating the problem, test his fix and communicate things to us.

 

[daffy]

Then we need the cases - and assembly will finally start.

Really? The cases still aren't shipped? The last discussion of the cases made it sound like they should have shipped a week or so ago.