WiFi speed on Thinkpad

A

almostunix

Hi, new to the forum.

Anyone working on advanced WiFi for FreeBSD? I know its more of a server OS but I love the stability and run it on a Thinkpad. Virtually everything (including KDE plasma) works like a charm, it can run Bhyve and watch videos from my Netflix subscription. (I run 3 different FreeBSD systems but the laptop is the one that uses wifi).

Just one thing, WiFi speed is hung up at 48Mb/s mode with ~25Mb/s real speed. while ethernet is easily hitting above 900Mb/s. would love to improve WiFi for coffee shop usage or quick file transfers for when its not hardwired. (I already tried moving the thinkpad close to the Access point and there is 0 improvement. iPhone hits about 600Mb/s on the same wifi and its a few years old)

Are there any tweaks to the driver to improve the speed or is modern WiFi not supported yet? Happy to do testing if anyone is working on WiFi support.

If this is already covered in another post I apologize, in searching I only found posts from several years ago on the topic.
 
bsduck said:
As of now, only 802.11a/b/g/n is supported, but support for 802.11ac is on its way and 802.11ax will follow later. Be patient :)
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Hmm I think 802.11n should hit ~300Mb/s and that would be fine for now. I’ll check the access point settings, maybe it’s set to a/ac/ax only. If there are any testers needed for the 802.11ac, I’d be happy to volunteer.
 
scottro said:
There is also wifi box. I didn't get it to work, but many others have. (Though others, like me failed). https://github.com/pgj/freebsd-wifibox
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I was hoping to do this within FreeBSD… I have several other ways of obtaining fast internet including Linux or windows VM or external hardware as other options but the goal is to have a laptop that is comparable to my Mac in functionality and WiFi is an important part of that. Is there a way to use a Linux driver? I have Ubuntu subsystem installed for Widevine support….
 
almostunix said:
Is there a way to use a Linux driver?
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bsduck is correct. No. However interestingly the iwlwifi(4) is basically the Linux driver ontop of an abstraction layer. So in the future it may be more possible to integrate more Linux drivers faster. However it still won't be a user-facing thing like the old ndiswrapper stuff was for Windows network drivers.

You might be able to find something like the old PQI Air Pen (but supporting n+ speeds) to convert Wifi to ethernet. It actually runs a small embedded Linux. You could probably use a Pi for a similar use-case.

Or come to live in the UK. The wifi speed will no longer be the bottleneck compared to the crappy copper phone cables ;)
 
almostunix said:
Hmm I think 802.11n should hit ~300Mb/s and that would be fine for now. I’ll check the access point settings, maybe it’s set to a/ac/ax only. If there are any testers needed for the 802.11ac, I’d be happy to volunteer.
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Important part here is to make sure the wifi card is Intel-branded. Then it will work under FreeBSD pretty reliably. I have an Intel 8265 AC card, and it works great.

Keep in mind, however - FreeBSD only supports up to G speeds, no matter the card, even if you have AC/AX/BE - rated card.

Well, G-speeds means up to 54 MB/sec, Netflix/Youtube don't take up that much bandwidth. It would take bittorrent to really stress a G-card. Even Github doesn't allow you (or any other given person/device out there on the Internet) to download anything faster than at 3 MB/sec. That kind of speed still gets you a 1 GB iso file in about 10 minutes.
 
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