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Possible Duplicate:
How to fix slow Wi-Fi on Thinkpads or other machines with Intel wireless cards?
How do I fix slow wireless on Intel wireless cards?

I'm dual booting 12.04, and Win7. Just a tiny bit of background, I'm starting to get more and more interested in programming and 3d modelling, so I'd like to learn more about ubuntu as a result of those interests. Still a complete newb though!

Anyway, When downloading on windows, I get 1.5mb/s easy. Now I swap over to Ubuntu, and it hasn't topped 150 kb/s since I installed it some 6 months ago. I'd downloaded most of my programs on windows, so I never really noticed it, but as I'm committing to ubuntu more, it's starting to hinder me. I'm with Shaw, on their Highspeed 20, which gives me 20 mbps down, and 6mbps up. Speedtest.com shows me varying figures somewhat close to what shaw says they give on both windows and ubuntu, which is to be expected, given that it is shaw afterall...

So, I don't know what you guys need to know, and I know even less about how to get it to you. Whatever information you guys need, tell me how to get it, how to get it up here, and i'll get it on here!

I thought it might be that I'm using a proprietary driver, when an open sourced one would work better? But I really have no clue. Any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks guys!

Community
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Chris Paplinski
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  • Connection speed is usually measured in "megaBITS per second", while download speed is in "megaBYTES per second" - to get theoretically possbile download speed you need to divide "megabits per second" by about 10. From your question it's not clear you're using correct units in both cases - for one thing, on a 6 megabit per second link you can't even theoretically get 1.5 megabytes per second download speed. Just being pedantic :) – Sergey Sep 13 '12 at 03:23
  • That's my bad, I got them backwards, 20mbps download, 6mbps upload speed. – Chris Paplinski Sep 13 '12 at 03:27
  • So, you use a proprietary driver for an Intel wireless card? Can you elaborate on that. – mikewhatever Sep 13 '12 at 03:33
  • Well I don't know what ubuntu uses for my card. I should probably have explained a bit more. I'm on a Dell XPS 15 L502x Laptop. Its got the Intel Centrino Wireless-N 1030 card. I know that, for example, the proprietary Nvidia drivers aren't so good, I though it might be the same case with the wireless cards. – Chris Paplinski Sep 13 '12 at 03:38
  • So are you saying speedtest.com gives roughly the same numbers on Ubuntu and on Windows, which roughly correspond to what your ISP advertises? – Sergey Sep 13 '12 at 03:43
  • yes. It ranges from 11 mbps to 19 mbps. Downloading blender (the 3d modelling program, from blender.org) on windows peaked at 1.5 mb/s, and on ubuntu, was below 100 kb/s – Chris Paplinski Sep 13 '12 at 03:45

1 Answers1

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you could try something like this, temporarily:

sudo modprobe -r iwlwifi
sudo modprobe iwlwifi 11n_disable=1

as shown here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1996768&highlight=11n_disable

you might also want to disable powersaving on your wireless card http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1686641

Blanko2
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  • Disabled the powersavings to no avail, made no difference.

    And disabling 11.n was interesting...Once I reconnected, I immediately downloaded a file, and it reached 200 kb/s for the first time. THEN the connection to the wifi went to the dog. Had to restart a couple of times, and the router for some reason stopped broadcasting. Had to restart it twice before the wifi was back online. I tried disabling 11.n again, and with less drama this time, but the internet speed is the same as before, below 100kb/s

     – Chris Paplinski Sep 13 '12 at 04:21