Fritzbox 4040 upgraded to 21.02.2, one client has extremely poor 2.4GHz wireless performance

Installing and Using OpenWrt Network and Wireless Configuration
1

Fritzbox 4040, client is a BMAX Y13 running Debian / testing, with kernel 5.16.0-3 / -4 and wifi is Intel Wireless-AC 9461.

A LAN transfer with, say, scp would easily top 5MB/s with 21.02.1 whereas now it either stalls or crawls around at a measly 50kB/s even though the wifi link speed is nominal. With older point release it would not matter which band was used: the VDSL2 WAN link (70/20) could be saturated either way; with the current version, on 2.4GHz the performance is abysmal and on 5GHz it is mostly fine.

What could be the issue here?

2

fwiw, poor performance is known problem with 2.4 GHz on EA6350 v3 which uses same SoC.

Check out the optimized build this thread. 4040 is supported

https://forum.openwrt.org/t/optimized-build-for-ipq40xx-devices/44125

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Is it version 19.07 or 21.02 ? You kinda mixed both in the thread title :wink:

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Fixed title and text, nice catch

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I'll have a look... if I can keep devices on the higher band I'm fine, then.

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Without resorting to such drastic changes as another build or a version rollback, is there anything else I can try? Change of firmware, perhaps? I'm baffled that such a degradation occured in a point release.

For the moment, I have set a band preference on the two laptops and that should cover it.

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I would try the "ath10k + ath10k-firmware-qca4019" driver package instead of "ath10k-ct + ath10k-firmware-qca4019-ct" even if it shouldn't have changed from 21.02.1 -> 21.02.2.
I had troubles when using ath10k-ct driver which didn't occur with the vanilla ath10k driver.

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Make sure that WMM is enabled.

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WMM is enabled on all SSIDs, I'll try the firmware change when I have a spare moment, thanks.

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I used the firmware builder (online, via auc) so the firmware is in the /rom tree. Granted, I can install the new driver and new firmware but how do I switch to that?

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If you are using a release version, just remove ath10k-firmware-qca4019-ct and kmod-ath10k-ct and install kmod-ath10k-firmware-qca4019 and kmod-ath10k via shell or web interface.

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I'm not sure whether an image generated via AUC qualifies as "release" version but I've done that, restarted the radio with "wifi" and forced the laptop on the 2.4GHz band: the performance is still less than on the high band but not at all terrible, so I think it could be working. Is there anything in logread that will tell me exactly which firmware has been loaded?