Atheros AR9285, Linux and 802.1n (oh and a linksys E3000)

Question

Recently I bought me a Linksys e3000 access point. I configured this access point to, on 2.4GHz, only allow connections with 802.1n. The laptop I use has a Altheros AR9285 wifi chipset.

Connecting works fine but the connection speed is not what I would expect. The distance between me and the access point is 2 meters with nothing in between.

When downloading from a host behind the e3000 serving a file from a ramdisk (400MB) to a ramdisk on my laptop, I get 1544.9 kB/s. A pc which is connected using a wire reaches 27330.2 kB/s, which is considerably faster.

So I did a iwlist wlan0 scan and this is what I got:

                Quality=65/70  Signal level=-45 dBm  
                Encryption key:on
                Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s
                          24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
                Bit Rates:6 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s

What is going on here? The AP tells me in its webinterface that it is capable of doing 150Mb/s. Also with my wi-spy I verified that nothing else is using the spectrum of the configured channel.

Anyone got an idea how to fix this?

Answer 1

Your Client uses the Altheros AR9285 wifi chipset that transmits a single stream. Your Linksys e3000 uses Broadcom BCM4716 chip rev 1 pkg that transmits 2 streams Your client has no ability to take advantage of the 2 streams so it dumbs down to the lowest common denominators which is eactly what you are getting.