Wifi discussion

[Sphinxter]

I've got a WRT54G (linux version) .. many many years old, but such a good router I'll never replace it I've got it running Tomato firmware.

I get about 150KB/s, which is a bit slow, but quite usable.

The oddity I have is the wifi is totally fubar'd if my laptop is 'on' (I've not experimented further .. what distance away from laptop remedies it, etc); anyone ever heard of such a thing before? I thought wifi was totally shot on the unit until I tried it from my bedroom one day, and it worked great. Took me awhile to realize the issue .. I can turn laptop wifi off and poof, pandora works.. turn wifi back on, and dead, connection goes to hell and hangs. Amazing (Really very annoying, since when I'm doing development, it would be nice to scp the files back and forth, for instance, but alas not

jeff

Sounds like your laptop won't shut up. Not sure about g/n but a b device will not speak until there is silence, checks, another device talking, waits a random fallback time period then checks again. A cordless phone in the same band that can't find it's base station has been known to shutdown wireless for a city block.

 

[atomicthumbs]

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.

Craig, any chance you could check what wifi channel your router is set to?

 

[notaz]

Posting for some attention:
http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/56039-updated-wifi-driver

 

[WizardStan]

well... huh.
Bothered by fluctuations between 1Mbit and 24Mbit, I started experimenting with forcing fixed bit rates. I was able to make it connect at 54Mbit and it had no problems maintaining that connection. I tried some other speeds, 18, 24, 36, downloading a 30MB file at each speed: every one of them averaged out to about 300KB/s. At 54Mbit, it would spike to 600 and fall back to 200, but overall it averaged to 300KB/s as well.
So I went back to "auto" bit rate. Reported connection speed immediately fell to 1Mbit. I started the same file and... got 300KB/s? Some further experimentation and I've found that when the network is idle, with the card in auto bitrate mode, it drops to 1Mbit entirely automatically. Within seconds of the network going high, it spikes to 24, 36, even 48Mbit sometimes. The problem is that 300KB/s would be more like a 5.5Mbit connection. This is a local server, I should easily be getting close to 1MB/s, if not 2MB/s. Also downloaded to a RAM disk, so it's not SD limited. This is also with power saving off. (Just tried with power saving on, only a little slower (250KB/s))

Can those experiencing especially slow speeds (below 100KB/s) try the following? Open a terminal and type
sudo iwconfig wlan0 rate 24M fixed
wait 10 seconds or so for the change to take effect, and try another download. See if it is any faster, or if the connection dies or anything like that. You can also try 36M, 48M, and 54M but I'd be surprised if they made any difference.

 

[Chaser]

Tried those settings last night Wizard as I always am sub <50kbs
Used the app store for various titles. At default I was getting 40kbs max
@24M this halved.
@all others it remained below 40kbs

Just tried again

Daimonin 12.6mb
@54M max speed 35kbs dl time >5min
@24M max speed 49.4kbs dl time <4min

This is with full wifi reception strength and Notaz new wifi driver so no re-connection issues anymore. Router is a belkin but only on a WEP setup. Will try WPA2 etc today.

 

[craigix]

It's worth knowing that my belkin router has no security on it at all, it's just 'open'. It works great with the Pandora.

 

[Dead1nside]

You shouldn't have to compromise on security, having an open access point is very silly for two major reasons, anybody can use it, and none of the data whatsoever is encrypted so anyone can sniff your data out of the air.

 

[Zipperwitz]

Using a Netgear DG834GT (with WEP security). It's great. It doesn't seem any different to my (wireless) laptop. My first gen touch is rubbish in comparison.
As a side note, i did have to get the dns working by typing something like 'sudo usb down' or something - the details are in the help section. I LOVE my pandora.

 

[EvilDragon]

As a side note, i did have to get the dns working by typing something like 'sudo usb down' or something - the details are in the help section. I LOVE my pandora.

That's only necessary if you haven't installed Hotfix 3 yet