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Toby
Asked: 2010-08-19 13:21:40 +0800 CST

How to improve wireless network speed?

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I am running 10.04 LTS on a desktop PC with a Belkin G-Plus MIMO Wireless network card.

Ever since running Ubuntu on the machine I have noticed fairly slow network speeds (about half the speed I get when running the same card through Windows) I did some research I found out that by and large wireless network cards aren't that well supported on most Linux distros.

I was wondering though if there is anything I could be tweaking on the system that could help squeeze a little more out of the card?

Here is some more information

*-network:1

   description: Wireless interface
   physical id: 2
   logical name: wlan0
   serial: 00:1c:df:24:5e:54
   capabilities: ethernet physical wireless
   configuration: broadcast=yes ip=192.168.1.5 multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bg
10.04 wireless

4 Answers

  1. You didn't mention what kernel driver you're using for the card, but often tunables can be found in /sys/module/[driver]/. For example, my iwlagn driver shows this:

    bryce@lynmouth:/sys/module/iwlagn$ ls

    drivers/ holders/ initstate notes/ parameters/ refcnt sections/ srcversion version bryce@lynmouth:/sys/module/iwlagn$ ls parameters/ 11n_disable amsdu_size_8K antenna fw_restart4965 queues_num swcrypto 11n_disable50 amsdu_size_8K50 disable_hw_scan fw_restart50 queues_num50 swcrypto50

    To find out some more info about what the parameters mean, look at the output of modinfo <driver>.

    To change values of a parameter, just do "echo [number] > /sys/module/[driver]/parameters/[parameter]". Some parameters are read-only, so do a "cat .../[parameter]" to check that your new value was set.

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  2. This isn't ideal but can you try a different wifi card? Wifi can be really hit and miss. At least this way you can determine if a different card makes any noticeable bandwidth differences.

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  3. You can try enabling Jumbo Frames.

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  4. Try running this command in a Terminal window (Ctrl+Alt+T):

    sudo iwconfig wlan0 rate 54M
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