[2008.9] Wifi very unreliable

[vasco.nevoa at sapo.pt]

Hi all.
Now that you mention this, I think the problem is Hardware based.
I've bought an Asus Eee 901 :D, and now I have a means of comparison  
in terms of WiFi reception.
My conclusion is that the Neo FR's wifi sucks.
Example1:
- my home AP has WPA; sitting 2 meters away from it, the FR show 50%  
signal strength. Okay, you can say that's too close and they are  
"shouting" at each other, causing signal corruption. Very well, I take  
it 10 meters away, behind a couple of normal walls. The signal  
strength drops all the way, right down to 5%, which is pretty  
unusable. The Eee901 has 100% signal strength in the vicinity of the  
AP, and behind those walls shows 30%.
Example2:
- at work, the Eee901 picks up 4 weak networks, the strongest one at  
35% strength and joins (no security) without problems. The FR picks up  
only the stronger one at 8%, and it cannot join it.

This has convinced me that either the wifi on the FR has serious  
hardware problems, or the software is misguiding it. Anyway, it needs  
serious attention.
Has anyone filed bugs on this wifi problem?

Vasco.

Citando Xavier Bestel <xavier.bestel at free.fr>:

> On Tue, 2008-09-30 at 11:06 +0200, Matthias Apitz wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I'm using the Wifi-method described in
>>
>> http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo_FreeRunner_Wifi#Using_WPA_and_.2Fetc.2Fnetwork.2Finterfaces
>>
>> i.e. having a working config file /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
>> for all my known access points (which is just a copy of that I'm using
>> daily and stable in my two FreeBSD based laptops); and I'm trying to bring
>> up the eth0 with
>>
>> # ifup eth0
>>
>> this works very unreliable; in (let's say) 8 of 10 cases it can't
>> associate to the AP, even not after fresh re-boots and independently if
>> the AP at my home works with WEP or in my office with WPA;
>
> I found that, for WEP networking, the only working way is to manually
> configure the interface:
> iwconfig eth0 key <yourkeyhere>
> iwconfig eth0 essid <yourssidhere>
> udhcpc eth0
>
> And even then, it's not guaranteed to work, or if it works, it won't for
> long.
>
> HTH,
> 	Xav
>
>
>
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