wifi-optimization

[McLovin]

Hi.


I'm pretty unhappy with wireless networking on my pandora. Builtin wifi was a big selling point for me and it turns out to be no real fun. Recently I connected several wifi-sticks i had lying around, both ralink based, and found I only had to copy the firmwares to /lib/firmware to get those going. One was even worse then inbuild wifi, the other, rt73usb based, was pretty good, though still inferiour to my notebooks connection. and now, i've lost that stick somewhere


I wonder what you guys experienced so far and if you have any recommendations for equipment. Would money be better spend in some new wifi-stick or a new router?


When I had the wifi-stick running, i started to use the pandora frequently. Now it's starting to collect dust again

 

[Eight Bit]

weird, I have no real issues using wifi on mine. infact it works pretty well. Not as fast as my laptop but download speeds of 4 to 500kb per sec isnt bad imo.

 

[Blue Protoman]

Agreed.

 

[chosen]

It took a lot of experimentation with router settings to get to a generally usable state, although at times wifi still seems slow and occasionally prone to the disconnect issue that requires wifi toggling off/on. Works pretty well for web-surfing and receiving net radio, not so well at downloading large files. I just hope that it can be improved further through the driver. The range is good now that I have a large antenna on my main router, works as well outside in the garden as it does by the router.


I was hoping that a usb wifi stick would be a solution, as I'd heard they work very well, with the right model. I haven't had time yet to try with the couple of wifi sticks I have and I've generally been resorting to SD mass storage to load any large files.


I love my Pandora so I can forgive a lot

 

[bzar]

Turning off the power saving features of wlan turned it from unusable to expected performance for me. It kept dropping all the time and got really bad transfer rates before that.

 

[McLovin]

Hey, awesome. didn't know that command existed.


Can I switch powersaving on runtime and does it actually have any effect on battery life?

 

[bzar]

You can switch it on/off at runtime. Effects on battery life depend on your use, but:


working, but power hungry wlan > not working, power efficient wlan

 

[Tom`]

My wi-fi works as expected with power-saving on, and turning it off doesn't seem to have any effect at all on transfer rates - I get average transfer rates of 700-900 KB/s either way. This is almost twice as fast as my DSL, so it's not bad at all.


My router is a Linksys WRT54GL running DD-WRT v24-sp2, in case that helps anyone.

 

[WizardStan]

does it actually have any effect on battery life?

With power saving on, an idle wifi uses only slightly more power than if the wifi were turned off. Turning power save off, even an idle wifi uses almost as much power as if it were transfering a stead stream of data.


Basically, if your network usage is to turn it on and leave it on so that it can simply refresh your email every 5 minutes, you will notice a difference in battery usage. If you turn it on for the purpose of actually doing some surfing, and then shut it off when you're done, you shouldn't notice any differences in battery life.


The router definitely makes a difference. There isn't near enough data points to know exactly what, but I can tell you anecdotally that I've had two routers configured in exactly the same way: on one I topped out at 300KB/s at best, on the other I'm consistently getting 500-600KB/s with peaks of 700 and 800KB/s.

 

[Tom`]

The router definitely makes a difference. There isn't near enough data points to know exactly what, but I can tell you anecdotally that I've had two routers configured in exactly the same way: on one I topped out at 300KB/s at best, on the other I'm consistently getting 500-600KB/s with peaks of 700 and 800KB/s.

Are you sure they were configured exactly the same? There are tons of advanced settings (exposed in DD-WRT via the Wireless->Advanced Settings tab, oddly enough) that I don't remember being configurable on other routers I've used. A few are self-explanatory (TX antenna, RX antenna, max associated clients) but most are rather obscure (CTS protection mode, frame burst, beacon and DTIM interval, fragmentation threshold, RTS threshold, AP isolation, preamble, shortslot override, afterburner (I guess this is designed to speed things up, but I don't know how it works, and it might have a negative effect if your other devices don't support it), and Bluetooth coexistence mode (I've never had any Bluetooth issues here even though this is disabled)).


Anyway, what would be interesting is if we could get some people who are all running the same router software (DD-WRT, tomato, or OpenWRT, say) on different hardware, to see whether it's a configuration issue or a hardware issue.

 

[TheGrandPubaa]

The router definitely makes a difference. There isn't near enough data points to know exactly what, but I can tell you anecdotally that I've had two routers configured in exactly the same way: on one I topped out at 300KB/s at best, on the other I'm consistently getting 500-600KB/s with peaks of 700 and 800KB/s.

I've tried changing channels on my Airport Express, turning off all security, turning off power-saving, and even tried other wifi hotspots, and I average about 20-30KBps. The fastest i've ever transferred(according to speedtest.net) is in the 70KBps range. My connection on my laptop can download upwards of 1.1MBps, so something's clearly askew. I've never had a wifi device that has such a low transfer rate, and it's a shame, because everything else on my Pandora has been perfect so far. I seriously hope it's not a hardware issue, but i'm not sure what else to try, or if there's even any hope for a faster connection.

 

[McLovin]

yeah, something's terribly strange there ^^


here some statistics from me


inbuilt wifi with powersave on : 200 kb max, ocassionally falling to 30-60


inbuilt wifi with powersave off: 500kb, pretty stable


rt73usb wifi stick; about 1Mb pretty awesome


rt73usb was awesome for streaming videos from a ssh share. that doesn't work so well with inbuilt for now, but well enough if you buffer locally and give it a litte upstart

 

[WizardStan]

In the name of science, I am going to open mine up again this weekend and poke around at the antenna, see if I can reproduce some of these slow speeds through controlled breakage.

 

[tsh]

Yet another variable to add to the mix, I've just retired my DG834GT (which had acceptable but not fab performance with my pandora) because my android tablet was having increasing problems connecting (seemed like dhcp was on the blink, together with frequently dropped connections). Replaced with a 2-wire router from ebay, problem gone. So even one make/model of router can vary quite a lot.


@WizardStan, the biggest variable is going the be on the radio signal quality side, not antenna performance. The antenna (first order) only affects the signal strength, it can vary by 30dB and speed will not be affected. Upset the quality of the clock, un-balance a filter or add ringing to an analogue path however, and you get the 'many people in a crowded room' effect, no matter how loud, you can't pick out an individual conversation (and it may not matter if there are any other 2.4GHz radios about, you can still get a hall of mirrors effect).


Did anyone tabulate the measurements that people have made yet? I guess there may be some bad routers, and probably less obvious distinction of the good ones.

 

[chosen]

My wi-fi works as expected with power-saving on, and turning it off doesn't seem to have any effect at all on transfer rates - I get average transfer rates of 700-900 KB/s either way. This is almost twice as fast as my DSL, so it's not bad at all.


My router is a Linksys WRT54GL running DD-WRT v24-sp2, in case that helps anyone.

Please would you (or anyone whose Pandora wifi is 'fast') please post a screenshot of the wifi->advanced settings page from DD-WRT. I would like to see if there's anything different to mine and see if I can improve things. Many thanks!

Here it is.

Thanks. I changed CTS Protection, Frame Burst and Afterburner, and it's made a definite improvement! B)

 

[Tom`]

Please would you (or anyone whose Pandora wifi is 'fast') please post a screenshot of the wifi->advanced settings page from DD-WRT. I would like to see if there's anything different to mine and see if I can improve things. Many thanks!

Here it is. I don't actually remember changing any of the settings except "TX Power" from the default - I would add that while "CTS Protection Mode" says "Default: Auto" there, the online help says the default is for it to be disabled.