Comment 70 for bug 190515

I have an Edimax EW7128g, using the ralink RT61 driver, which apparently should "work out of the box" on Ubuntu Hardy (http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk/products/wireless/). Anyway, it does, and iwconfig shows that it is correctly recognised as connecting via 54M 11g . However, download speed is approximately 1Mbps (compared to 10Mbps on Windows), and upload around 200Kbps (compared to 4Mbps). I also experience random freezes whilst downloading large files (see separate bug for other reports on similar freezes https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/228633). When I place the computer next to the wireless router, the signal strength is around 50%. Strangely, after moving to another room with 3 intervening walls, the signal strength increases to 60%, although the download speed decreases.

Downloading the backport modules as suggested above does not help. Interestingly, if I change the speed of the connection to 11M by typing "iwconfig wlan0 rate 11M", the download speed increases to around 4Mbps, and the upload speed to around 2Mbps when I am next to the router. Now, moving into the other room again, where the signal strength is around 60%, the download speed decreases to about 700Kbps, but the upload speed remains at 2Mbps. Windows achieves the same speeds (10Mbps and 4Mbps for download and upload respectively) wherever I place the computer.

So far, it seems that the freezing only occurs when the rate is set to 54M, and not when it is set to 11M.

I am running Hardy, with kernel 2.6.24-19.

I have not yet tried ndiswrapper on the windows driver, but thought my observations may possibly be of interest/use to someone.