Conversion from Ethernet to WiFi, help with performance?

[Guest nathanEll]

Hello,

 

Unfortunately, I am here today having to ask for some help with wifi performance. Here's the thing; in my university residence, they've removed our wired internet in favour of wireless. We used to have ~10MBps down speeds, but now I'm lucky when I get 300KBps down. Over this summer term (May - August), there thankfully is maybe a quarter of the amount of people that typically live in residence (which is ~800); however, their wifi system cannot handle the traffic as it is it seems. Thing is, they just put in the wifi last October, so the system is still new, all these fancy Cisco wifi APs on every floor (at least two per floor).

 

Thing is, I have a couple problems now, many of them unsolvable. For one, I no longer have wireless printing as I cannot manually enter wifi settings on my printer, it requires WPS which now I don't have access to. But the main issue is the wifi performance on my desktop. I get disconnected quite often, and a typical trend in my connection is as follows:

 

1. Enable my wifi card
   
2. Card connects to wifi ap belonging to the residence
   
3. Internet speeds are usable...
   
4. Internet speeds gradually decrease over time
   
5. Either get disconnected from AP or, more common, I have no down speed
   
6. Disable wifi card
   
7. Go to number 1
   

 

 

Now I also have an android tablet and phone that, while the internet speeds aren't great, don't have this issue. In my desktop, I've used two wireless cards, both of which have the same issues. One was a Ralink RT61 based card (limited to 802.11b/g) and my current is (according to lspci) an Atheros AR93xx based card, which has 802.11n, dual antenna for 2.4/5GHz support.

 

What I've tried is, from within my wifi settings, locked the NIC to a BSSID. The thing is the BSSID addresses are not always in range for some reason, and, making things even so much more of a headache, when scanning the waves with an app on my phone, I've found that from the area around my desktop, there is reception to around 36 individual APs!! I mean the building is 13 floors high, and I'm at one end of the building, and the building may be, say...150m in length? Maybe 200? And there is (as far as I know) only two APs per floor.

 

If anyone would like to see a log of the wifi APs in my area, I can also post a text file containing that info. As well, of course, if any other information is needed I'd be happy to provide it.

 

In a nutshell, is there anything on my end that I can do to A) increase performance, or at least B) stay connected more reliably?

 

Thanks,

 

Nathan Ell

 

System info:

 

Linux Mint 16, kernel 3.11.0-23, system always up-to-date with LM repositories.

Realtek 8111 (eth), Atheros AR93xx (wlan - D-Link DWA566)

 

Continue reading...