wifi issues workaround (work for me at least)

[Jey123456]

If your in a situation like me, where the wifi speed work perfect, it never disconnect so to speak but it "freeze" for like 30 secs every now and then, (your manager still show as connected, but no ping/packets pass for a while). you might have the same issue i had and tho its not perfect, i found a workaround that work great for me.


It didn't lower my speed or connection quality, but my connection to the router is of good quality to begin with, so it might not work everywhere (67/70 quality link).


The thing that lead me to that workaround is the fact that my pandora get slightly hot (hotter than anything else even overclocking to 1ghz and play some psx/n64 for hours, and still quite far from how hot my iphone get XD), if i download files on my pandora, it tend to start happening a lot faster. So im guessing the wifi chip is overheating. On that theory, i simply lowered the txpower down to 1dbm using iwconfig and all of a sudden, im able to download for a lot longer before i get any issues (if at all, downloading for 2hours still reproduced my issue, but overall it is a lot better).


I hope this little bit of info can help making our wifi closer to perfection =D.


P.S. im a complete noob when it come down to wifi hardware, so for all i know, it could be completly unrelated and just pure total luck that it work better now, but the result seem consistant, if i bring it back up to 20dbm, i can download at 900kb/sec for about 5min and it freeze just about everytimes, versus the 1.5-2hours + i get at 1dbm.

 

[DavidBowman]

Thanks for letting us know. Hopefully this will be of use.

 

[MarioPandio]

That's an interesting find. Could help many if it proves widespread a remedy

 

[Coldbird]

Im wondering about those random WiFi issues, were different WiFi chipsets used for different Pandoras?


Cause my Pandora behaves just fine on WiFi... I've been using it as a portable torrent downloader for a while...

 

[Jey123456]

well, you wont notice as much on torrent, since most clients show an average download speed over the last few minutes and not just the current speed (last sec or so), so even if your net "freeze" for 20-30secs, you wont notice it. try running a ping 192.168.x.x (or whatever adress your router is), and keep watch of it while you download, youll see that from time to time, it just stop receiving answers (if you dont add a timeout, it will freeze until the connection unlock), you can see the issue im talking about using that technique quite easily.


I believe that with the older wifi driver, instead of freezing, it was directly disconnecting which is slightly worse since all your current connections will be broke with the disconection (download canceled etc), where as the freeze just make them lag a bit.


Also, the speed does matter for this test, i dont experience much problems if at all when only downloading at less than 500kb. but my internet connection can get a lot higher and on most sites where i download stuff, im blocked by the pandora wifi speed and not the actual internet . That limit for me seem to be around 900kb/s (910kb/s-950kb/s depending on how it feel). Also when downloading at those speeds, i can see a lot more cpu usage than one would expect when clocked at 1ghz >_>. for instance, downloading a video from my lan will stick the cpu usage to 10-15% (and it spike higher) for the whole download duration.

 

[WizardStan]

Hmmm, others have mentioned their Pandora getting extremely warm as well, which I've had difficulty comprehending because mine doesn't get warm at all. But then, when I use the wifi, it's for at most 20 minutes at a stretch. I wonder if these other overheating issues are related to the wifi chip. Next time someone mentions it, I'll have to remember to ask.