Librem 5 Wi-Fi Performence Issues

Hardware Librem 5
1

I wanted to do a quick sanity check concerning my Librem 5. I have had quite the saga trying to get Gnome Calls working on the phone, and right now I have gnome call 46 working, however its working a lot better on my laptop than my L5. I am hoping the culprit is not a hardware issue.

I have had issues loading webpages (epipheny sometimes does not even want to load duckduckgo after multiple retries), downloading packages (sometimes it says it is trying to connect to pureos.net and fails, or takes a while), and OS updates, and the PureOS store has been almost impossible to use sometimes. Sometimes I get poor signal strength without even being that far from the wifi router (sometimes just about a room away).

I have noticed that SIP calls over wifi drop in the middle of the call (but come back eventually, though it seems they can hear me but I cant hear them) on the L5, but not my PC.

So I wanted to check and see if the wifi connection stats I have are similar to others.

I downloaded a package called wavemon and ran it. On my L5 wavemon tells me I have between 50/57% and 70% link quality, and the signal level is around -74 dBm (.04 nW to .5 nW)

.

On my PC I have 80% to 90% link quality and around -47 dBm (.02 uW to 5+ uW)

Note that the high numbers in nW and uW very quick are fluctuations.

“Speed Tests” seem comparable to my laptop or have excess of 1000 ping.

Do other people have around the same results on the L5? Are the typical performance characteristics documented anywhere?

P.s hope its not a privacy issue posting these details? Especially if my device is errant?

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Not sure, as there are different Wi-Fi/Bluetooth modules available for the Librem 5.

No, but laboratory tests from the manufacturers’ product page may exist.

That depends on your threat model.

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Starting point … which WiFi module do you have? Tips & Tricks · Wiki · Librem5 / Librem 5 Community Wiki · GitLab

I expect that is a different problem. Many users choose to update from the command line.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

That will at least give you a clearer error message and perhaps fault isolate.

You can monitor WiFi signal with

nmcli -f "CHAN,BARS,SIGNAL,SSID" d wifi list

but I don’t know what units it is using for the SIGNAL column

or if you have iw installed

sudo iw dev wlan0 scan | grep -E '^BSS|freq:|signal:|SSID'

For 2.4 GHz with WAP in next room I am seeing -47 dBm.

For 5 GHz with WAP in next room I am seeing -67 dBm.

With old (Redpine Systems) WiFi card.

So I guess I would be asking whether you are using 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz and if the latter whether it is an option to try 2.4 GHz instead.

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