Atheros QCA9377 working at low speed

I recently bought an ACER E5-573-50LX with an Atheros QCA9377 onboard. Thanks to some posts I was able to get the device working, using kvalo's software.

Acessing my WIFI router I get low speeds, (1Mb/s or 6 Mb/s) and a low signal rating. With the same PC & windows,all is fine.

Any suggestions what I can do to solve this?

Edit: requested output can be found here: http://paste.ubuntu.com/23133645/

Solution 1:

Research indicates that the information available on that interface is minimal however, It appears from your pastebin output that firmware is failing to load and no channel is getting configured. Since the QCA9377 supports it you might try iw which is a "new" nl80211 based CLI configuration utility for wireless devices. It supports all new drivers that have been added to the kernel recently. The old tool iwconfing, which uses Wireless Extensions interface, is deprecated and it's strongly recommended to switch to iw and nl80211.

You might start by insuring that there is no stronger signal than yours on the frequency/channel you intend to use (and if so pick a less crowded one) I've found the android app Wifi Analyzer useful in determining what the best channel to use in a specific area is. Having made this determination you can continue with configuring your router to that channel and then wireless as well with iw Documentation is available here.

You can get further useful information by getting station statistics against a peer

If you want to get specific statistics against a peer your station is communicating with you can use the following:

sudo iw dev wlp3s0 station get <peer-MAC-address> In the case of a STA the above would be the MAC address of your AP (router). Where wlp3s0 is your wireless device which matches to your pastebin output of wlp3s0: renamed from wlan0

You can use iw to specify specific Tx rates and Tx power as well which might be quite useful under the circumstances. I might also try turning off power saving for the interface. You can check it with iw dev wlp3s0 get power_save

If it's on you can turn it off with sudo iw dev wlp3s0 set power_save off

Solution 2:

First the ath10k driver doesn't report the correct/real speed as indicated in ath10k FAQ. So the "Bit Rate" stay stuck at 1Mb/s.

Second there is a major performance issue with QCA9377 in Linux kernel 4.4 , I recommend to upgrade your kernel to 4.8 version.

Solution 3:

Had the low Wi-Fi speed under Ubuntu 20.10 on an Acer Aspire E 15 e5-575g-53s6 with the same QCA9377 network card. The latest kvalo's firmware is already supplied in the system.

However, removing the /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA9377/hw1.0/firmware-6.bin file and rebooting helped. The system works with the previous firmware-5.bin with perfect speed now.