WiFi worse than on ISP provided router

Omnia hardware Omnia HW help
1

Hi,

I just received my Turris Omina last week.

I have been quite busy configuring the network to what I want it to be and playing around with all the goodies ness.

I am seeing a 20Mbps drop from the router Netmetr to what I get over WiFi on my laptop.

I am right at the side of the router, 1mtr or so, I attribute it to being WiFi “issues” because with my old router I have before this (BT Smart Hub 2) I was getting on my laptop the same way the “full” 70’sMbps.

settings
Qualcomm Atheros QCA9880 802.11acbgn
Channel: 157 (5.785 GHz) | Bitrate: 150 Mbit/s
Atheros AR9287 802.11bgn
Channel: 3 (2.422 GHz) | Bitrate: 52.9 Mbit/s

In the course of this week nothing apartar of the router has changed on my network.

So originally for the last two days I have been keeping an eye on I was getting on the high 40Mbps so I decided to play around with the settings a bit, I noticed the channel I was using for 2,4Ghz (auto) mid high frequencies was not the best, So I have moved (manual) it to channel 3 and maxed the transmission power for the 2,4Ghz radio.

This did improve the Wifi to high 50’sMbps but still I was some how expecting this router to be better or the same as the one I had. Not to be “worst”.

Any advise you could give me on getting the most out of the WiFi?

To be honest I am quite surprised about this as the other router didn’t even have external antennas.

Thanks,
\M

2

Switch to 5GHz instead of 2.4 GHz, and IMHO antennas are really not optimized for very short distances, at 1meter distance, just use an ethernet cable :wink:

You can also try to play with the relative positions of the three omnia’s antennas, which might help a bit.

3

Search around the forum. There are plenty of users having similar issues.

some notes, hints ....

Check if you have all radio cables at right place (there is official Turris video on Youtube with all how-to). Tight the terminators/antenas (gently). Set correctly region/time (so you have correct country code used for your wireless setup). In advanced settings (luci/network/wireless) you can set power and distance, to fine tune the signal reach/spread. Also you can increase HT mode (if you are not in area with many wifis around).

Also sometime ago i was checking HT on my Omnia and i found that to benefit fully from HT mode, use it only on one radio only, keep the second on default. Also note that higher HT setup, reguires to be on lower channels (i am not sure, under 15 is recommended).

You can also use alternative firmware(there are like two alternative packages in repository) , some users preffers original, some noted that “CandelaTech” is better for them (but i think it depends what country you are and what are the regulations)

How do you monitor the bandwidth? What Luci/Foris shows is actual usage. Also the statistics collection (collectd/rrrd) is just informative (agregated , depending how you have rrrd set) and for 2.4G radio it is actually showing flat line at 6MBit/s. So it is better to monitor it from client side using some tool (ideally using “iperf” to test various scenarios).

2 Likes
4

Hi,
I did forget to mention. I did have a look around the forum and I saw some threads about moving cards around when having SSD connected because USB3 caused interference with WiFi.

This is all I could find, how ever I did see mentions about the cables on those threads, I will check that out, I would have expected the for them to come properly connected from manufacturer but this is not the usual customer grade hardware kit so I will do have a look at the guts of router.

The region, timezone and such are properly setup I will look for the HT settings and the power/distance ones.

I am not interested on testing other FWs how ever I will keep it in mind.

To monitor the internet connection I am using the netmetr from the router side of things.

Internet link is good, healthy getting 70/14Mbps what is expected of my ISP connection.

The problem is when I am measuring the internet speed from my laptop “to the internet” where I am loosing around 10-20Mbps to messura that I use speedtest.net

On Luci the only graphs I can see are the Realtime graphs under the status section. but this will not give me the internet speeds only usage.

In statistic I can see Graphs where it looks like I can configure some sort of monitoring but haven’t looked in to what this is doing.

Thanks for you reply.
\M

5

There is this https://iperf.fr/iperf-download.php tool to stress/check your network. It seems complicated on first look,but in fact it is not so hard to set it up. There are guides for various scenarios. Ideally check/stress traffic : router->laptop, laptop->router and laptop<=>router traffic with various packet size and timeframes. Just to be sure that local network is fine. Very possibly it will be ok.

Also i forgot to mention, using IDS,Pakon or/and Ludus (resp: those using suricata) for inspection of packets. When active it can reduce bandwidth.

6

I have used iperf in the past, thanks for the advise.

Regarding software I got running on the router I am no using most of the High memory usage packages I really really would love to try them at some point but I want the router running smoothly “to its best” for a while.

I have just enabled Data collection, LuCi Statistics, Network monitoring with internet connection speed measurement from the monitoring side of things.

Keeping it lightweight for a bit.

7

I have currently in /etc/config/wireless:

config wifi-device 'radio0'
	option type 'mac80211'
	option channel '36'
	option hwmode '11a'
	option htmode 'VHT80'
	option disabled '0'
	option country 'CZ'
	option legacy_rates '0'
	option distance '10'
	option bursting 1
	option ff 1
	option compression 
	option turbo 1

config wifi-iface 'default_radio0'
    option device 'radio0'
    option network 'lan'
    option mode 'ap'
    option disabled '0'
    option encryption 'psk2+ccmp'
    option wpa_group_rekey '86400'
    option disassoc_low_ack '0'
1 Like
8

Maybe, try to use 40 or 80MHz channel width.

9

Atheros AR9287 802.11bgn
Channel: 3 (2.422 GHz) | Bitrate: 52.9 Mbit/s

Your settings as above, you probably should expect a bitrate of ~50Mbit on client side on that distance I would argue

10

Hmmm,

Well spotted. I am a bit amazed about that.

I wonder is that value calculated using the client connected to the front end in that moment in time or …?

11

Could be that the link is negotiated as 802.11g. (Max 54Mbit if I’m not misstaken)

1 Like
12

I was not aware about atheros device specific UCI options. Thanks mate. Wireless configuration [Old OpenWrt Wiki] Is there a significant benefit using them? I’ll be glad for any hints/insights. I will play with the setup anyway (after i make usual RTFM routine :slight_smile: …

You are not misstaken.

notes

i was able to reach maximum (testing with iperf) peak around 1,2Gbps (usually it is around 600-800Mbps or under 500 when idling) with 802.11ac wave2 client (intel pro card, with two internal ifaces). It was nice to watch how the total band is changing based on actual traffic, how far laptop was, or when there were some clients around. In some scenarios (when i was recording on client side all possible metrics) … it was obvious that if link is not utilized, it drops to minimum needed and when there was demand for more , it started to using all the “features” possible (side channels, mimo, vht/ht modes).
I am no longer fidling with wifi, for me it is pretty fast. Initially i was even trying to make noise/signal better and signal stronger , trying to find ideal channels combinations … , trying to find ideal antenaes position … and so on. I know Omnia wifi/radios can reach teoretical limits, rest is depending on client (and how crowded is surounding area …in my case 42 households with upc modem/or any other (with active wifi and eventually with active “isp guest wifi” feature) it became very , very crowded. That also force me to keep channel on auto as count of active APs changes during day and night. Also later i found that i can’t use HT40 on my 2.4 due all channels were occupied, so even i could benefit from it i was not able. Also it was not clear to me how and when to use HT20/40/80/120. Somewhere i found that if there are more AP active you can use HT mode only on one of them. Additionally there was notice, that for 2,4G wifi added-up side-channel and main-channel numbers should be under 15, for EU countries. later i also found that all my 2.4 clients are HT20 only, so no need for ht40 :slight_smile:

13

For me yes. Throuhgput of copying to or from windows laptop using samba raises form aroud 8MB/s to 20MB/s.
But surely it depends on file size, wifi chanel occupation, client HW and other things.

1 Like
14

The BT home hubs are also pretty decent WiFi access points in my experience. That is about all they’re good for though.

15

I was having troughtput via samba 20-60MB/s (in peaks 80) and it changes during the transfer (so average is around 40-50), now with the extra options i am having stable 91-97MB/s and without any down/uppeaks anymore. I just tested one scenario, but it looks very promissing. Thanks mate.
Here are graphs showing my two testing transfers (one via win-explorer, second via total commander)

troughtput_node42
troughtput_node42717×379 4.15 KB

ht40 vs ht20

I was trying to find out if i can use HT40/HT40+/HT40- on my 802.11n radio (2.4G).
When i use HT40 it sometimes detect “crowded” area and fallback to HT20.
radio1 (24836): 20/40 MHz operation not permitted on channel pri=6 sec=10 based on overlapping BSSes
If i use HT40- or HT40+ it cause my radioo(5G) to became unassociated (i do not have any info in log about it). When i set it back to HT40 on radio1(2,4G) , radio0(5G) gets associated normally again. At this moment i set the radio1(2,4G) to use HT20 with fixed channel 6. (i do not see any channel option where i do not have overlapping BSSID to benefit from ht40)

Regarding the collectd/rrrd stats…: radio0(5G) is always showing 6MB/s flatline in graphs, no matter if the actuall bitrate is higher). That is due limitation of collectd probe on phy0. So do not be confused by that. On the other hand phy1 (radio1(2,4G) does not have this limitation …