There is at least on n810 project that I have not worked on because the performance of the unit on WiFi is just *that bad* considering what it should be capable of.

Right now using

as the basis for testing and I can get 750kB/s down, some reports claim up to 1mB/s using netperf. This is 1/10'th the theoretical limit of 802.11g.

I have tried many different tweaks and they all top out at a very anemic 750kB/s, with many good networks topping out at only 500kB/s.

some of the things I have tried

• Changing to performance governor
• tweaking sysctl
• changing power saving settings
• using ssh
• downloading to mmc
• different AP's

I know it's not the network as other WiFi devices easily dwarf it in terms of performance. I'm not asking for 50MB/s I would be happy with it being able to push 3+MB/s over the interface. At the maximum speed of 750kB/s it would take 30+ minutes to push 1GB vs no more than 6 minutes over USB. To update a 6GB music library it would take 3+ hours over WiFi and no more than 36 minutes over USB.

A little more perspective is that my wife's iPod nano will easily upload 6-7GB of music in a few minutes.

This may be wrong but I was under the impression that the N810 was 802.11b. I would wonder if the available speed represents a compromise in battery consumption. Faster almost always takes more power.

Edit: I stand corrected the Wikipedia says b/g.

How fast are your other 802.11g devices? I usually see under 2MBps on my laptop.

I can easily push 5MB/s over a quiet 802.11g network without breaking a sweat. This is assuming a tcp based protocol that is almost 100% one way. Chattier protocols quickly diminish the speed.

I think there is thread here about 'overclocked' wi-fi driver by Serge and you can find his reports also in maemo-developers and cx3110x-devel at garage.maemo.org
(thread WLAN Horrible Roaming Performance (N800, OS2008), Software or Hardware Problem ?) Not sure now but the speed was over 1MB/s then. This is partly due to suboptimal code in cx3110x driver and slow SPI bus used for talking to the chip (raising SPI bus clock helps).

Usually you won't get more than some 22 Mbit/s actual throughput over 802.11.g, except when running some vendor-specific optimized setup (e.g. d-link router + d-link adapter, or asus-to-asus).

(wikipedia actually claims just 19 Mbit/s as average throughput: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11#802.11g)

Divide by 8 to get Mbytes per second.

5MB seems high, so you should consider yourself lucky, I suppose. You must remember that the physical layer limit of 11g is 54Mbit, not 100. And with 802.11, it is expected that one should get half that maximum (802.11 has it's own chattiness).

I have pushed large files over to my N800 via wireless (and scp), but I usually time it so that the amount of time it takes is not a problem (start the transfer just before dinner, for example).

I think you are seeing what pretty much everyone else is, in terms of transfer speed.

Craig...

2-3MB/s would be a several fold increase and at least within the realm of normalcy. The numbers that I am getting are so fixed it's like I'm running up against some sort of hard limit somewhere.

I think it's nothing unusuall at all.
Why? In mobile device when You connect subparts it's normal that You don't have full-speed on all channels (SPI for example) - That's not a way of designing battery operated devices. Other factors counts more than that.
Finally - it's not a network switch where it's network performance defines it's usefulness.
You tweak connections to fit devices needs and at this point is browsing the web, listening to streamed music, receiveing an e-mail - so that's what device is design for.

WLAN chip sleeps most of the time anyway and SPI bus is not always clocked as far as I know. I'm not quite sure that SPI speed affects power consumption much. Quite the opposite may be also true - the faster you download a file over WLAN, the faster WLAN chip can go to sleep and stop consuming energy.

Copying data from/to a device fast is a nice feature. Also network performance may be important for video streaming for those who care about it.

Yes, but finding more uses for the device is always a good thing. Availability of sources (for the stuff that is open) helps a lot and encourages these improvements.