Slow and erratic wifi

[Louisda16th]

My wifi seems to be very slow on Fedora 17 64-bit (Ubuntu as well). I have a 512kbps connection (which is already quite slow) but it takes forever for webpages to load. In many cases it isn't able to open websites at all. Chrome, for example, says Resolving Host and then gives up.

I use a wifi dongle and it seems to work out of the box. It's a DLink DWA-125 which uses the Ralink RT3070 chip. Here is the output of lsusb:

Bus 001 Device 002: ID 07d1:3c16 D-Link System DWA-125 Wireless N 150 Adapter(rev.A2) [Ralink RT3070]

The card is supported by the kernel so I haven't installed any third party drivers. Could someone please suggest how I could fix my problem?

I read a post which said blacklisting modules which aren't required will help. lsmod |grep rt gives me the following. Is there something here which I must disable?

rt2800usb              26758  0
rt2x00usb              19758  1 rt2800usb
rt2800lib              60984  1 rt2800usb
rt2x00lib              66508  3 rt2x00usb,rt2800lib,rt2800usb
mac80211              554733  3 rt2x00lib,rt2x00usb,rt2800lib
cfg80211              197072  2 mac80211,rt2x00lib
crc_ccitt              12614  1 rt2800lib

The devices page wireless.kernel.org says that the corresponding module for my dongle is rt2800usb.

Thanks in advance!

PS. I was running a yum update while typing out this post. In the beginning I had very bad speeds and the downloads would fail (I got the Trying other mirror message several times). But now I'm getting a good speed of 60+kBps which is close enough to my max network speed. yum isn't able to connect to Google's servers to update chrome however.

[sea]

If erratic means something like disconnecting often, check the content of the resolv file..

cat /etc/resolv.conf

If there is just a single IP, which reminds you of a local network ip range, you could gain best results with restarting your modem/router.

AFAIK: Local network ranges usualy starts like: 192.*.*.*, 10.*.*.*, 127.*.*.*

Hope this hlps

[Louisda16th]

Hi sea. Thanks for your reply.

What I meant is the fact that the connections becomes really slow often. So slow that my browsers time out. My wifi connection doesn't disconnect from the router. resolve.conf contains the following:

# Generated by NetworkManager
domain local.lan
search local.lan
nameserver 192.168.1.1

192.168.1.1 is what points to my router.

[sea]

As already said, please restart your router in case it displays a local network ip.
Which it does as you posted.

[Louisda16th]

I did, several times. The contents of resolv.conf are the same. Is it supposed to change or does restarting the modem do something which improves the speed (I really don't know)?

[sea]

No but just came in mind, i did restart the services after the router.

sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager.service

And this step should rewrite the resolv.conf.

[Louisda16th]

Done. In fact I did restart my computer after the router was restarted (that's when I added my previous post). I ran the command as well just now. What change should I see (resolv.conf is the same)? I'll need a while to check if the speed has really improved or not. It looks fine now so thanks a ton :-).

[sea]

Weird. But glad it helped

I would had expected to have at least one other ip address saved, more like an external one.
Well, i was (am) confused by your resolv.conf but it seems you truely have a local nameserver.

Reseting the router is just in case the router has an internal freeze, like the BSoD of windows or a kernel bug in linux.
Restarting the computer is just the brute way of restarting the service, which should re-write (in this case) the content of resolv.conf.

[Louisda16th]

Hmmm see if this makes sense to you.

In a previous version of Fedora, 14 I think (when I would have to install a rt3070 driver from RPM fusion), there was a problem. This also exists in Ubuntu 12.04 and Linux Mint 13 (these are the distros I've where seen the issue). Basically, there would be times where I couldn't connect to the wifi router at all. I would need several restarts (on the router) and it would finally work i.e. my OS would be able to "see" that my router exists and has the SSID I provided.

I have an android phone with gingerbread on it so it has a 2.6.35 kernel on it. Here the above problem still exists. So I'm guessing there was some issue which was fixed in a later version of Linux. Just a guess.

I'm telling you this because when I restarted the router several times, I did so till my phone was able to connect to the router as well. Do you know why previous distros and my phone have this problem? Could it be related to my speed slowing down? It's also quite puzzling because the speed is the same in both cases on my Windows setup.