Interesting, you are seeing a difference also between up and down though it's closer depending on the run, but it's the opposite of what I'm seeing. Go figure. Wifi is all over the place.
FWIW, you can repeat the UDP tests with the -R flag, to test the other direction.
You're right, I've added that to my post above.
Anyone noticed if yoiur wifi speeds degrades over time? I have that feeling, if I reboot the router everything is fast again.
It could just be one of my wifi > eth bridge adapters.
Maybe you have this problem?
I'm really curious whether others are seeing terrible performance with the ct firmware vs the mainline firmware.
No, not really in an iperf test with ath10k or ath10k-ct. Mainly stability and a noticeable lag on quick response. This latter one needs a bit of explaining.
The stability is something that happens not only on my MacBook Pro, but also on the Windows 10 laptop my wife is working on from home. After about 7 hours working from home, we both experience WiFi issues. Other devices, like the iPads of iPhones might not have that immediately, but soon will experience that too.
The noticeable lag is best described by how I see this happening on the Twitter app on my iPhone, or how the Teams app on my MacBook Pro behaves:
Twitter behavior
With ath10k-ct: when browsing the timeline, I open a tweet that has responses, each time I want to view other responses, it takes a few seconds before they are loaded by the Twitter app. When I switch driver and firmware to mainline ath10k responses load āinstantlyā. I can reproduce this every time. It has become my test method to determine whether ath10k-ct has been improved or not.
Teams behavior
With ath10k-ct: when chatting with someone directly you get this feedback when a message is delivered, read or when someone is typing. You also see a status indicator if someone is available, in a meeting, presenting or is away. Iāve found that this type of feedback often doesnāt work or not reliably. The Teams app is unable to recover this, unless I close and start the app again. Iāve asked others whether they have the same experience at the same time or wether there are Azure issues but the answer is no. When I switch driver and firmware to mainline ath10k these issues donāt come back.
From what I can make of it, with the -ct driver and firmware; once a large stream (download or an active video call) is active the performance is okay, bit with tiny requests it takes a long time (a few seconds with the Twitter app) or the request simply times out (the Teams app on my MBP).
Yes, ct firmware performance is a lot worse than mainline. My issue is described here:
https://github.com/greearb/ath10k-ct/issues/138.
I think the low SNR rates compared to mainline are a clue as to what's happening.
Unfortunately when the author responded I lost interest and time to debug it further.
My issues with CT firmware can be summarized as:
None of these seem to happen with the mainline firmware.
Question regarding CT driver: does anyone understand what is changed in the CT driver from mainline? I know that in order to use CT firmware you must use the CT driver. But not sure about mainline firmware, whether using CT driver helps anything. It feels to me like there's no difference whether I use mainline or CT driver with mainline firmware but maybe others had different experiences. It might still be a good idea to just use just the CT driver if it has recent fixes and it doesn't introduce issues.
From my experience, Qualcomm has become impossible to work with. With CT, there's the possibility to report problems to the CT developer @greearb (although, by the looks of his products, for Wifi 6 he went with Intel for now) on his page: https://www.candelatech.com/ath10k-bugs.php .
From my experience, mainline ath10k driver is by far more stable than the -ct variant thatās included in OpenWRT. I havenāt used the -ct firmware with the mainline driver (probably because by lack of knowledge/skills my gut tells me that wonāt work reliably), but when I used the -ct driver with the mainline firmware from kvaloās GitHub repository, my WiFi connections still are not stable or perform as good as when I use the mainline driver and firmware. And Iām not alone, when I look and search on the forum.
From what I can make of it, most of these individuals experience āa problemā with ath10k-ct driver and firmware, but are not as capable or knowledgeable as most developers or professionals to either understand the different concepts of Linux, drivers, firmware, router hardware, networking and WiFi to be able to debug or help in a way that actually provides good information for developers in general or the CT developer in particular to assist in finding the culprit. The knowledge/skill gap is probably too large to be able to be of any assistance.
Is there an idea, educated guess on how much success stories there actually are with -ct driver and firmware? Success is not always actively shared on the Internet, problems however mostly are (generally speaking).
You cannot. CT firmware requires CT driver or your dmesg will be full of errors.
Hi all, on this device, I am seeing a cap at 60 Mbs download on 2.4 Ghz wifi.
On wifi 5 Ghz, it easily goes over that number.
Is it an expected limitation of the device, or is there something wrong in the settings of my 2.4 Ghz radio?
2.4ghz is victim to interference, 20mhz channel width, and the older wireless 4 (or older) standards. Theoretical max speed is 150mbps for a 1x1 client. 60mbps-80mbps is the same room is a good result.
5ghz usually has significantly less interference, 80Mhz channel width, and supports wireless 5 (for the r7800). All with significant performance improvements. Most clients are 2x2 for a max theoretical speed of 866mbps. Up to 500-600mbps in the same room with optimized settings is possible.
Bottom line- anything that needs speed should be on 5ghz wifi.
Thanks for that. I sort of thought that as well. The thing that made me doubt is that the ISP's router itself, on 2.4 Ghz is easily going up to 90 Mbs in the same room. So it seems that the Netgear router is performing worse, which I was not expecting.
OEM proprietary drivers sometimes have a speed advantage. r7800 2.4ghz isnāt the strongest performer.
Ok, good to know, thanks.
I get almost 100Mbps on 2.4GHz with smartphone using 40MHz mode. Most of the latest smartphones I've used lately only support 20MHz on 2.4GHz. That's in the same room and the 2.4GHz is of course relatively crowded.
With the same smartphone I get ~60-70Mbps through three brick walls and over 12 meters from the router.
Just for comparison only two other routers I've tried (Belkin RT3200 and an old TL-WR1043ND) were able to send the signal to the same spot but they were able to provide 15-25Mbps at most through the three walls. Still this is good considering that more than 10 other routers just couldn't even send the signal to that further point. There was no connection at all.
I use ath10k drivers and firmware and I think the R7800 is the most potent performer over 2.4GHz. This is with just one fifth of its full power.
As said many times on the forum if you use Speedtest to obtain the result you may get really wrong values.
Hi @sppmaster, thanks for this insight. This is very interesting and indicates a problem in my configuration, I think.
I have tried several different online broadband speed test, and they all indicate speed below 60 Mbps.
I have tried to make my configuration vary, 40 Mhz mode, WPA2 instead of WPA3, etc. I can never get this correctly.
I use the latest firmware (OpenWrt 22.03.0) which I assume uses ath10k driver?
Do you have any pointer as to what I could be missing?
If you wish to try use @ACwifidude NSS enabled build. I recommend you first try his latest master branch. This one has ath10k driver/firmware
R7800-20220926-MasterNSS-ath10k-sysupgrade.bin
Then test the WLAN performance with iperf3 server and client. Server to be run on wired computer connected to the R7800 switch. Search for details on the same thread. There are many posts about it.
Probably the version you currently use has ath10k-ct driver/firmware which is default for OpenWrt. I couldn't get good results with this driver hence I use ath10k.
Another "wrong" thing that I've found is that for ISP speeds of 100Mbps and below the Speedtest results are really inaccurate. Even on 5GHz the test gives most of the time only 50-60Mbps.
Hello guys,
on my side I've been using 19.07.3 release for quite a long time, I was getting ~500 to 600 Mbps download through wireless and > 600 Mbps upload behind a Gbps link. (900 to 1Gbps using Netgear firmware).
A few months ago I've tried to update to 21.02.1 with which I was hardly reaching 300 to 400 Mbps in download. I've just tried the latest 22.03.0 and it's approximately the same story, sometimes I'm not even able to reach 300 Mbps.
Does anybody has an idea on differences between releases that could lead to that and how to solve that ?