Wireless N card stuck with a 'link speed' of 72mbit

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Freemun

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Oct 3, 2013
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Hi everyone,

This is a brand new laptop. The wireless card in question is a Qualcomm Atheros AR9485.

In task manager, the link speed is showing as 72mbit. During downloads, I'm achieving a maximum of 50mbit.

The other laptops and computers on this network are all achieving 90+mbit downloading from the same server. I tried setting the router to wireless N only, updated the driver to one released a few months ago, set the driver settings to wireless N only and prevented windows throttling the device to save power. Nothing has worked.

I'm not really sure what's limiting it here. Does anyone have any suggestions?
 
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cklaubur

Distinguished
Oct 4, 2006
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Wireless signal strength and speed can all be limited by distance from the router, number of walls and their composition, and the layout of the antennas in the laptop/card.

Just some things to consider. If you move the laptop to another location, does the signal/speed change?

Casey
 
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Freemun

Honorable
Oct 3, 2013
13
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10,510


Nope, the laptop is about 30cm away from the router. No walls or obstacles between. It might be worth a mention that the link speed is 72mbit from anywhere in the house. The link speed never decreases.
 
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bill001g

Titan
Aug 9, 2012
28,309
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72m is a very telling number. I am going to bet it is actually 72.2m

What this means is you are actually getting very strong signal and are using what is called MCS 7 for encoding the data. This is as fast as you can go using a 20mhz channel with no mimo support.

Your card from what I can find supports 40mhz channels so it should go to 150. But if the router or the nic settings are set to force a 20mhz channel then it will only do 72.2. If it is the router that has this set then your other equipment may support mimo. Simplistically it means they transmit multiple streams of data at the same time. Most time they indicate the support by saying they can do 300m or 450m. But this assumes a 40mhz channel. You can run mimo on a 20mhz channel and get 150m rather than 300m. The card you list here though does not support mimo so the maximum you can get on a 20mhz channel is 72.2

All this stuff is negotiated between you NIC and the router. It will run what ever the highest combination that is allowed.

First would be to go into your router and see if you have it set to allow 20/40 or 20 only for the channel width. Some routers call this narrow and wide. Then verify your nic does not have some strange setting.

The last thing to check is to turn off a option in the router that forces it to go to 20mhz when it detects signal on adjacent channels. Now this may actually get you a better number on the connection speed but your actual usable speed may be much less due to interference from a neighbor. No way to tell other than to try it and see what happens.
 
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ivicakmk

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Nov 13, 2015
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I know this is a bit late answer, but I had the same issue.
I am not sure if you should force the 40 Hz, but just in case try it.
The important thing is to use WPA2 AES, not TKIP.
My pc was connecting on 54 Mbps with 150 Mbps usb adapter, and the laptop on 74 Mbps simply because my encryption was set to TKIP & AES.
After changing it to AES only, both got connected on 150 Mbps.
My internet speed test went from 20 Mbps to 50 Mbps. On cable it goes several Mbps more, but this was big improvement.
 
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Robert_1970

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May 28, 2016
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I just bought a new laptop and ran into the same problem as described above. I was this close to wrapping it up and bringing it back when I did a final search on "stuck at 72,2 speed" and came across this thread. Your solution works perfectly! Switched to 40Hz and now I have 150 Mbps :)) THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!

 
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