Atheros AR5008 802.11n wireless - why so slow?

[Aaron44126]

I have a laptop with a wireless card with the Atheros AR5008 802.11n chipset.

When I'm connected to an 802.11b or g network, the speed seems reasonable. However, when I am connected to an 802.11n network, the speed seems unreasonably slow. I checked iwconfig and got this info:


wlan0 IEEE 802.11abgn ESSID:"Vanguard Airport Network"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:1B:63:2C:C5:54
Bit Rate=1 Mb/s Tx-Power=23 dBm
Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr=2352 B
Power Management:off
Link Quality=73/100 Signal level:-48 dBm Noise level=-95 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
...Huh? 1 Mb/s? Under Windows, I connect to this access point at 130 Mb/s.

If it matters, the access point is one of those Apple Airport Extreme base stations. We have a few of them set up as access points only. This is the only 802.11n hardware I have to test with.

Anyone seen something like this before, or have any ideas of how to kick my wireless card into gear?

Thanks.

[Gizmonty]

I also have this issue with an Atheros AR5008 PCIe card (D-Link DWA-556). My iwconfig is essentially identical. There doesn't seem to be a solution posted anywhere. Can anyone shed some light?

[Aaron44126]

I messed with this some yesterday and figured out how to load the latest version of the wireless drivers from here: http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Download

I haven't had a chance to test it yet to see if there is any difference. I'm going to be trying it out tomorrow.

If it works better, I will post directions here on getting those drivers compiled and loaded. If it doesn't work, I'll file a bug report against ath9k at wireless.kernel.org, where the development seems to be going on.

[Aaron44126]

Sorry for double posting but I wanted to report my results.

The ath9k driver dated November 10, 2008 performs much better. But I got a kernel panic after a short while of using it so I went back to the original, slow driver. :-P

Some numbers:

Transferring from an FTP server on my LAN.
With the stock Ubuntu driver I get about 220 KB/sec.
With the newer driver I get a little over 3 MB/sec.

Hopefully they'll fix it up and it'll make its way into the kernel eventually.

I've noted all of this in my Ubuntu bug:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/298192

[Aaron44126]

[Edit]
This was an accidental double post that I did not intend!