tc3alpha3 - wireless anomilies with wicd and iwconfig

[bigpcman]

I have been playing around with 802.11n wireless connections some more and noticed the following:

1. In wicd the properties information show info reports the link signal at 50% but the main wicd dialog window reports "connected at 100%. Meanwhile iwconfig reports link quality at 70%.

2. In wicd the properties information show info reports wpa2 while iwconfig reports " Encryption key:off". The connection is a wpa2 link.

3. iwconfig can't set the rate greater than 54M nor does there appear to be any other way of setting "n" speeds.

atheros chipset ar5416 / ar2133
AR5008 Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)

[jur]

1. I am guessing you are talking about 70/70 that iwconfig reports? That seems to be 100% and I have seen mine report 100/100 as well. I havent' found out what's when. With the switch to tc3.0, I am confused as to what I saw where.

3. 54M is n class performance. I think getting anything better would depend somewhat on the driver but don't expect that much more, according to various things I have seen at SmallNetBuilder - the best speeds are just barely above 54M, in the 60s or the very best card, in the 80s. 135M seems like a pipe dream. And the only place this would be useful is if you want to pipe full BW HD movies around the network, plus no other bw may be taken up by other machines or tasks. Cable would be the only option for that. Regarding internet, the speed in the vast majority of cases is limited by the ISP connection speed. The network connection speed is of course determined by radio signal quality.

[bigpcman]

3. 54M is n class performance. I think getting anything better would depend somewhat on the driver but don't expect that much more, according to various things I have seen at SmallNetBuilder - the best speeds are just barely above 54M, in the 60s or the very best card, in the 80s. 135M seems like a pipe dream. And the only place this would be useful is if you want to pipe full BW HD movies around the network, plus no other bw may be taken up by other machines or tasks. Cable would be the only option for that. Regarding internet, the speed in the vast majority of cases is limited by the ISP connection speed. The network connection speed is of course determined by radio signal quality.

In windows xp the combination of the dwa652 and dir615 router in close proximity allows me to establish a 300Mbps link. In testing a 308MB file xfer from my desktop to my laptop I measure 60 seconds at 300Mbps and 240 seconds at 54Mbps. The 300Mbps link is limited by the 100Mbps lan link where as the 54Mbps link is limited by the wifi radio. These simple tests were done with no security encryption enabled.

[jur]

Check out that link I provided - it gives information about the alleged 300Mb/s windows link.

[bigpcman]

Check out that link I provided - it gives information about the alleged 300Mb/s windows link.

Good link but not new information. The point is that I get a "real measured" 4x speedup xfer rate when the 802.11n link runs at "full speed".  After searching around abit, it seems the linux drivers and wireless tools like iwconfig are not able to activate the 802.11n speeds. For instance, iwlist reports speeds that max out at 54Mbps for my dwa-652 (AR5008 adapter).

[jur]

Check out that link I provided - it gives information about the alleged 300Mb/s windows link.

Good link but not new information. The point is that I get a "real measured" 4x speedup xfer rate when the 802.11n link runs at "full speed".  After searching around abit, it seems the linux drivers and wireless tools like iwconfig are not able to activate the 802.11n speeds. For instance, iwlist reports speeds that max out at 54Mbps for my dwa-652 (AR5008 adapter).

Not sure what you mean by not new... that is from Feb this year. The table in Q1 shows maximum speeds in perfect conditions. The side bar to the right shows the wireless performance leader board - Buffalo Technology WZR-HP-G300NH average throughput at 48Mbps.

The latest review, a "300MBps" EnGenius router he measured a maximum of 60.9Mbps single direction and some 74Mbps both ways simultaneously combined total.

your measured 308MB per 60s is 41Mbps. That is typical n class speed. And so is 54Mbps. But perhaps that 54Mbps reported is a sort of 'marketing' speed, and that the actual useful speed is a lot lower.

So perhaps your wireless link is not running full speed despite being reported at 54Mbps... I have no way right now to test mine.

Anyway, I am still sure you can safely forget about actual 135Mbps.

[bigpcman]

Good link but not new information. The point is that I get a "real measured" 4x speedup xfer rate when the 802.11n link runs at "full speed".  After searching around abit, it seems the linux drivers and wireless tools like iwconfig are not able to activate the 802.11n speeds. For instance, iwlist reports speeds that max out at 54Mbps for my dwa-652 (AR5008 adapter).

Update: I ran some speed tests on ubuntu 10.04 and found that it's running the 802.11n link almost as fast as in windows xp. The 308MB file transferred in 83 seconds ... so that's good news. I didn't do anything special, I just used the wireless connection manager to establish the link. Also I have been running more tests on tc3alpha3 and have found that for unknown reasons the transfer time has improved to 135 seconds for the 308MB file. So it's improved from being 4 times slower to 2 times slower than "full speed n" connections.

[jur]

What happens when you iwconfig in ubuntu?

[bigpcman]

What happens when you iwconfig in ubuntu?

It provides the normal report but the link speed is reported as being 1 Mbps. I should also point out that I was running wpa2 for the ubuntu test. I'm not sure but it seems when wpa_supplicant is running the iwconfig tool has problems. This seems to be true for tc as well.

[jur]

I'm using wpa_supplicant and I get the 54Mb/s report. I just tried puppeee linux and same story there.