Wireless Preformance less on Linux than Win98

[Craig Bell]

Thank you, Dave, for the quick (and Honest!) reply.  I might kindly suggest 
that this fact should be documented in the iwconfig man page, or at least in 
the README.   Is it then safe to assume that the link quality is all part of 
the card and its firmware, and not in OS configurables, and that I'm actually 
getting the same connection under SuSE as I am under Windows?

To further test, I lugged my system into the same room as the router/AP.  I 
got 92/92 for the link quality, but my Konquerer performance is still very 
bad, so obviously I have some other issue.   

Craig

On Sunday 07 March 2004 4:51 pm, you wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 07, 2004 at 04:37:10PM -0700, Craig Bell wrote:
> > I've got a dual booted Athlon 550, running Win98 and SuSE 8.1.  My eth0
> > connection is a Netgear MA-311.  The wireless lan on both systems works
> > fine, but Konquerer is much slower on the SuSE to load pages, etc, than
> > IE on the windows side.
> >
> > The Netgear Configuration GUI on Windows shows that my Link Quality is
> > around 90%, and the Signal Level a little less.  When I compare that to
> > iwconfig under linux I get much less, about 64/92:
> >
> > eth0      IEEE 802.11-DS  ESSID:"ourwirelesslan"  Nickname:"Prism  I"
> >           Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.462GHz  Access Point:
> > 00:30:AB:17:54:E2 Bit Rate:11Mb/s   Tx-Power=15 dBm   Sensitivity:1/3
> >           Retry min limit:8   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
> >           Power Management:off
> >           Link Quality:64/92  Signal level:-51 dBm  Noise level:-149 dBm
> >           Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
> >           Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0
> >
> > I'm running the orinoco-0.13e driver on Linux, and the netgear supplied
> > driver on windows.
> >
> > I've spent the afternoon trying to find what I can on the web about
> > tuning wireless performance, but aside from being in over my head on most
> > of it, I haven't seen anything that directly compares how to get the link
> > quality up or why it would be less on SuSE than on Windows in the same
> > box in the same room.  I would sure appreciate some kind help to increase
> > my throughput, or at least some easier to read doc on the subject of
> > performance.
> >
> > Is there any chance that I'm barking up the wrong tree, and that it's not
> > in the wireless config at all?  Can the lower link quality from iwconfig
> > be explained some other way?
>
> Yes.
>
> I don't really know how to properly interpret the signal level values
> that the firmware returns.  So the signal level reported by iwconfig
> is quite possibly bogus, or at least on a different scale to that
> reported by Windows (it also seems to be reported slightly differently
> for different firmware versions, which makes life tricky).
>
> Now if you had a markedly different measured throughput, that would be
> different question.