Wifi discussion

[mali]

^ I've encountered the same over the years with a few devices. Some just don't work together. I didn't do troubleshooting, though.

 

[Blue Ion]

Thought I'd better add this too. Won't be the reason for all of the problems but can contribute to them. Worth checking that your router supports the full spec or not

A lot of the time it's because the router company was trying to get ahead in the market and released the new model of router before the new wireless spec was finalised. This means that the router doesn't completely comply with the full wireless spec and some of the more advanced features don't work.

That may be true with 802.11n standard, but both g and b has been around for years now. And considering routers die after several years of constant use, I doubt many people have routers of more than 6, 7 years old.

Just for the record I too couldn't go faster than 20 kb/s perhaps some times at 100kb/s (when I reach 500 kb/s) with a Linksys WAG54GS using WPA2, channel 11 on a clean environment (with absolutely no other router in the vicinity).
Then again, I couldn't do any more tests, with different configurations or a newer router I have, a Comtrend HG536+.

I forgot to try using a NFS share I have on a computer and test raw speed, as it is supposed to be optimized for speed and latency.

Still, a new thread with problematic wifis will be helpful for whomever is doing the debugging of the wifi. Specially to test new drivers or whatever might be the problems.

 

[Hitnrun]

I had a very small Linksys wireless router that was the size of two match boxes, and it always worked well for me. But the Pandora could only stay connected to it about 30 seconds.

Now I got a new TPLink standard router, and the Pandora works great with it, no disconnections at all. So the router model definitely matters.

 

[zx-81]

Same here using a Linksys WRT54g. This router works fine with PSP, NDS, Netbooks, PCs, Wii & PS3. Using the pandora i have to restart the connection with a /etc/init.d/wl1251-init stop & start, then reconnect with the network manager under xfce.

When i use a simple script to ping the gateway every second i've a more stable network connection, good enough for browsing. But if i'm doing a stress test (for example to copy big tar ball with scp in a terminal) then it freezes after 20 seconds.

The speed is not stable, it is between 50kB/sec up 250MB/sec for file transfert on my LAN.

edit: using a free hotspot (with small bandwidth and slow connection) it works fine. So i guess it is related to incompatibility between wifi driver and router.

 

[grahamr]

I had a D-Link DI-624+ and was using WFE It was horrible (slow wierd disconnects etc). However, I accidentally broke the router in an unrelated incident, and replaced it with a NETGEAR WFR614 over WPA2
It works great now for normal internet stuff. (I havn't bother benchmarking, as im really not that interested in numbers)
So the stuff about routers being at fault is not just whitewash.

 

[milkshake]

Mines the thomson wireless N router that o2 provide, Im one of those people who has issues with wifi speed starts of really fast but crawls to a slow speed after a few mins dropping 10kbps untill it tapers of to 30-40kbps this happens with my router at home and my girlfriends orange wireless router iv also tried a local wireless transfer i.e. pc->router connected by LAN router->pandora connected by wifi transferred file from pc to pandora and same thing happans as what happens when downloading a file from the net starts off fast then tapers down to a slow speed.

 

[silver]

So the stuff about routers being at fault is not just whitewash.

Well, the issue looks more like the the wifi driver/settings are at fault, which makes the router chipset significant....

 

[dgame]

I now use this commands on campus:

sudo iwconfig wlan0 rate 9M auto

This is with power management on.

Pandora used to drop Wifi connection within 10 minutes, now it stays on.

I used to do rate 11M auto, but that still would occasionally drop.

 

[emcee]

...
So the stuff about routers being at fault is not just whitewash.

Saying it's a router issue, is like saying a truck that can't drive on dirt roads is a "road issue" (Sorry best analogy I can come up with on such short notice). It's definitely router specific, but that doesn't mean the router is at fault.

Sure I could get a different router, they're fairly cheap, and I can just get one of the ones people have had success with, but the Pandora is a portable device, ideally is should work well with a wide range of access points.

For the record, I'm also using a WRT54G, hardware version 8.0, with the latest firmware, I've had it for a few years and it was used when I got it. I've used it with a ton of different devices and laptops (I used to fix computers in my home for a living) and have had no real issue (although it's not like I did exhaustive tests). On my Pandora my speeds hover between 30 and 60KB/s.

I said in another thread it was "ridiculously slow", but that's more spill over from frustration with other issues. It's bearable, and I would've killed for those speeds when I was on dial-up. But it does hurt the usability. On my n900 I can copy games and pictures to my device without touching a cable, and watch movies and play music directly from network shares, all from any room in the house (or on the porch or in the garage for that matter).

Well, we got some guy who wants to work on the WiFi driver.
He's pretty experienced with those things.

First idea he had when we talked about your reports is that there is a problem in testing routing in the driver.
When a router and a WiFi device connect, they run a few tests to figure out what connection settings are best.
If there is some problem here, the router could use wrong settings which could lead to a very slow speed as well as some other weird things (I know one user reported that the Pandora messed up DHCP in his router - and some users report problems when you use the Pandora together with multiple devices on one router as well).

This test is being done every few minutes (varies depending on hardware), so it might also be the reason that the connection drops after about 10 minutes for some (the test might get a result at the first time, but might fail when it retests it and drops the connection).

He'll start looking at the code from tomorrow on, let's see what he finds out.

I just wanted to point out that this is awesome. Recognizing and admitting there's a problem, and taking steps to fix it.

 

[WizardStan]

Saying it's a router issue, is like saying a truck that can't drive on dirt roads is a "road issue" (Sorry best analogy I can come up with on such short notice). It's definitely router specific, but that doesn't mean the router is at fault.

Close analogy, but not close enough. What we have here is a truck that seems to follow the standards when it comes to trucks being able to drive on some roads that appear to follow the standards but not all roads that appear to follow the standards of what it means to be a road.
Maybe there really is a problem with the road. Maybe the road is at a 1 degree grade steeper than what is supposed to be; that 1 degree doesn't matter to 95% of the vehicles out there, but our truck (and anecdotally a small handful of other trucks) is a little heavier with a slightly different suspension (still within spec) and for our truck, even though it follows all the guidelines that declare it is a safe truck, is not safe on these slightly too steep roads.
Or maybe it's the other way: our truck is just a little heavier, with suspension just ever so slightly out of spec. Most of the roads are flat enough that it doesn't matter, but some roads that are graded close to the edge of spec (but still within spec) give our truck problems.
One way or another it is a compatibility problem. Unlike a truck, however, we can more or less change our "weight" and "suspension" with software. We just need to figure out what in particular about these "roads" is making our "truck" unsafe.

 

[daffy]

Don't know if the HF4 I just installed changes this. But I've generally gotten great range, reception and throughput -- right until the connection gets dropped within usually 10 minutes. So that the units are tested for connection before packing is nice, but not actually relevant to this discussion.

I carry my Pandora around, and connect to a wide variety of routers, and have seen the problem with all of them. I tried turning off the power saving as suggested elsewhere, and that just makes the battery go flat in no time, but doesn't stop me dropping connections.

At home, I run the latest DD-WRT, which I believe is generally considered to be pretty good. But my Pandora craps out on that.

I'll be trying it out at a college tonight. I'll report if it stays connected under HF4.

[Edit]Yep: just tried leaving it on my local network, and it's died again pretty quickly.

This is a really major issue for me: I bought this thing so I could carry a computer with me and get online at public hotspots. But it's pretty much useless for that, since I can only go online for a few minutes at a time.

 

[greendots]

My pandora has a better signal/range then my couple laptops or itouch. Websites load fine and fast but for some reason, I cannot download files larger then a MB or two. The download always fails. Anyone else experience this?

 

[silver]

My pandora has a better signal/range then my couple laptops or itouch. Websites load fine and fast but for some reason, I cannot download files larger then a MB or two. The download always fails. Anyone else experience this?

I've fought similar issues in the past with incorrect MTU/MSS settings. This can be set in the OS, the router, the ISP and even the driver...

What's the default MTU for pandora OS?

 

[gruso]

Just checked, it's 1500.

 

[paulguy]

My pandora has a better signal/range then my couple laptops or itouch. Websites load fine and fast but for some reason, I cannot download files larger then a MB or two. The download always fails. Anyone else experience this?

I have trouble similar to this.

It can usually stay OK for a little while (though will pretty much invariably drop within an hour or 2) but if I actually try to download anything that may take a few seconds even, it'll just crap out. The same files downloading at a slower rate (<50KB/s) seem to be OK. When stuff IS downloading well, it seems to go pretty fast. 350KB/s from the internet, which is the max, but it is unstable as well. It can be around 350, then 100, then 250, back to 350, down to 80, then 200, then 5, etc. Power management off helps mildly.

This was on a Westell 7500 as well as some NETGEAR ADSL modem/router thing.

(I had gotten a USB wifi adapter which has ALSO crapped itself after working for about 3 days, which I threw across the room and can't find anymore. Hopefully the problems will be found and fixed and that won't matter. I'd sure like to get back to working on debian.)

 

[Iorgy77]

Does the wifi work better when the pandora is on charge? Craig mentioned every pandora they test works fine. Perhaps they are being charged as the test is being done?

 

[craigix]

Does the wifi work better when the pandora is on charge? Craig mentioned every pandora they test works fine. Perhaps they are being charged as the test is being done?

We test them with the battery they ship with (two tests for the price of one!).

 

[silver]

Just checked, it's 1500.

If I was having issues downloading, like greendots, I would lower this.

1492 is a common setting. Although for testing I would just drop to 1450.

This is unlikely to cause the wifi dropouts though, unless the driver is borked...

 

[craigix]

The driver is from a Nokia device and they don't develop the driver anymore, so no doubt it can be improved, but we're pretty sure it's not hardware at faulty because as I say, they all work with my router.

 

[Grench]

Does the wifi work better when the pandora is on charge? Craig mentioned every pandora they test works fine. Perhaps they are being charged as the test is being done?

We test them with the battery they ship with (two tests for the price of one!).

As a follow up to someone mentioning that it fails when their notebook's wifi is on...

Do you usually test the Pandora WiFi one unit at a time? Or do you fire up 10+ of them and have them test at the same time?
Knowing how they behave as a WiFi hive might help point the driver writer towards an answer?