WLAN signal strength - good or bad ?

Werner Almesberger werner at openmoko.org
Sun Oct 5 02:12:03 CEST 2008


Joerg Reisenweber wrote:
> WLAN is RF and thus again voodoo.

Heh :-) Well, I ran the  iwlist scan  a number of times to make sure I
didn't just get some freak results.

What I'm looking for is the answer to two questions:

- what performance can people reasonably expect, especially when
  comparing to other devices ?

- do we have a problem, i.e., does our device perform consistently
  much worse than other devices using similar technology ?

Obviously, results will be fuzzy around the extremes, but that technology
isn't entirely unpredictable either.

> Reported dB and % values are usually not standardized between drivers, and 
> I've seen a lot of bogus values being reported.

Yeah, see the 0dBm and -98/-95dBm I got from my laptop ;-)

- Werner



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