A little further down the road at least I have the impression that the situation has improved with more recent kernel version (4.13+). Can someone else confirm this? Now I can successfully associate with 5GHz access points which did not work at all before. There is still room for improvement but it is somewhat better.
I still uphold my theory that the TX signal strength is the problem and I suspect that the ATH9k driver is very conservative on choose the TX power. I just have not yet found a way to force it to higher TX power, the driver’s algorithm will always reset it if I manually increase it…
I also have the feeling that it got better with recent updates on my machine (using Solus here) although I’m on the LTS branch (4.9.66). This aside, it is still a big problem in everyday use and oftentimes I just use a mobile internet hotspot because it is very slow or doesn’t work at all. Like someone wrote aove, quality is degrading really fast when moving away from the router, so sometimes, when I need to download or upload something, I have to walk to the room with the router
I love using my Librem so much and use it very often, so proper WiFi would be a relief. I will just stay tuned and thanks for investigating this issue!
If the wifi card is AR9462, then antenna diversity is irrelevant since AR9462 is a 2-stream card. Diversity is used only for 1-stream cards (like AR9565 etc.) and with such cards the HW will switch reception between the main and aux antennas based on various factors to improve RX performance.
BT coexistence and antenna diversity can’t be enabled at the same time - but this limitation doesn’t apply to AR9462 since diversity is not used at all with this chip.
It’s been sometime since the last post here, so I wonder if anyone has any news on this? I am also experiencing relatively poor wifi performance on my Librem 13 v2 compared to my other devices.
If I’m not close enough, I see frequent loss of connection to APs when other devices have no problem, and when connected often considerably poorer performance than other devices. For example, my phone gets better than 100Mbit/s compared to 5 on the Librem in the same location.
I’m running pureOS with latest updates (kernel version 14.17).
I’ve seen @mladen suggest using a non-free driver from Debian buster here, but especially with a Librem I’d prefer not to use non-free. That said, I’d be interested if anyone can comment on the performance with the non-free driver - sometimes I really need working wifi in places not super close to an AP…
Thanks for the link to the other driver. I’d not seen that. Although it’s about librem15, not 13.
For me (OP) I got my librem back and it’s better, but still I’d say it’s the device I have with the worst wifi range, including raspberry pi’s with built-in on-PCB antennas.
Can confirm that the wifi performance on my Librem 13v3 running PureOS is also subpar and weaker than all my other devices. Hopefully new iterations of the Librem 13 swap out the Atheros card for a better one (using free drivers)!
Terrible wifi performance here as well, I have a librem 13 v 3 with latest updates. For the price you would expect at least a working wifi card, people should be warned!
#metoo, but if the closed source driver really improves it, then the free driver can also be improved. In that case you can’t really blame the card. But it would be nice to see some activity there to improve the situation!
There are various reports that turning off hw encryption can help slow speeds and dropping connections with atheros wireless cards. I haven’t been able to test particularly scientifically, but from some quick testing on an AP used by may people (and hence variable performance anyway), it looks like it might help in my case.
To test I unloaded the ath9k driver
sudo modprobe -r ath9k
then reloaded with the nohwcrypt option true
sudo modprobe ath9k nohwcrypt=1
Any updates from Purism about this? I cannot use my laptop on campus because the wifi range is so poor. At home I get 1 bar when 5 feet from the router, something isn’t working right.
This is a related problem that is linked to my topic as well. It went from super slow wifi, to now NO wifi. This is ludicrous. We pay top dollar for our machines. Aluminum case or not, we should still be able to actually access the internet. I am currently 12 feet from my router. I even tried sitting in front of the router last night and no dice…no access. I am currently using my wife’s reliable MacBook. I don’t have time to lose 2 hours daily attempting to obtain access to the world wide web. My wife’s machine gets 50mbs and I get 0mbs.
Sort of a response to my own question and problem Does anyone know why Link Quality for my wireless signal get worse the more time I am online? It was a 97% after I went ahead and rebooted. it was fast for about 20 minutes. Now, the signal quality is starting to rapidly reduce.
Any thoughts will be great. As I stated, we pay a bunch of money for our machines. They should run at top notch performance more than most the time.
This can actually be caused by many factors, so you need to eliminate them one by one.
Start with a live USB with recent wifi drivers, i.e. Ubuntu or Arch, then see if it improves.
Check your AP (router) wifi settings for anything not standard, especially if you run custom
firmware like openwrt (which you should anyway btw).
Which brings me to part 2, open the settings on your AP and check the logs there. Even the
crappiest models provide some sort of logging.
Well, to a few of your points, I have had my Internet Provider out to my home between 5-8 times over the past few weeks. The speeds they check showed there was not an issue they saw. My wifes Mac never slows down. As stated, i restarted my machine and it was fast for a about an hour. I could see the link quality progressively go down. There is something wrong with a driver or the wireless card.
I have been blaming my issues on my Internet Provider and it does appear the fault lies solely with the laptop.
I run iwconfig intermittently throughout the day to analyze my signal and it gets progressively worse to the point of failure. The link quality is normally around 42 out of 70 There is a problem and it needs to be resolved.
Unfortunately, the speeds are non-time-specifc. The only remedy I have found is to restart my laptop. That works for a short while. I am not a hardware expert, but it has to be either the wireless card of driver. It is almost like he wireless card loses strength or it somehow leaks as it were.
