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Originally Posted by jfarinella  Maybe I got lucky. All I know is I don't care what download or upload speed I am actually getting - as long as it works and I'm not tearing my hair out I say "who cares".
Also, I thought that if you have a 2M/7M cable connection to the internet, 18M wifi connection speeds don't matter. The wireless signal isn't the bottleneck it's the connection to the internet anyway. | While I appreciate your viewpoint, it could very easily conceal other issues with the device. Sure, I may only have a 7Mbps Internet connection at home, but my physical network is 1Gbps all the way and my wifi is 54Mbps. If I am accessing resources on my internal network (streaming music, movies, reading docs, etc), then I want to be able to leverage that speed.
Also, the issue that was generally reported wasn't so much that the wifi connections were slower than they should be, but that the signal strength is poor (which leads to slower connections). The other half of that issue is that poor signal strength results in reduced range, i.e., "it works when I'm in the same room with my wifi access point but if I go downstairs I can't connect" types of issues.
One other very important thought about wifi connection speeds: wifi is shared media, much like ethernet hubs that we used back in the day. Because of that, you only get to use a slice of the wifi capacity in your area, so if you have many wifi devices or are in a building/area with many wifi devices you will get worse wifi performance, even if everyone is using their own access point/wifi router. If you're having issues with wifi speeds at home I would recommend that you use a tool like WiFi Manager (Android) or NetStumbler (Windows) to find a channel with less interference and set your AP/router to use it instead. Channels 1, 6, and 11 don't overlap with each other, so I would pick the one of those that has the least competition. Your WiFi devices will use scan all channels and use whatever the AP/router is using, but you have to tell your AP/router which channel to use (most default to 6). That won't help you much in public areas, but it might help at home.
All that said, it sounds like some of the later patches seem to be improving issues. I'm guessing that they are adding something in software to compensate for the signal quality/strength, much like Google/Samsung had to do with the LTE Galaxy Nexus after it was released. I'm actually picking my TP up on the way home from work this evening, so I'll be sure to give it a thorough once-over to check signal strength all over my house both before and after all updates.
Last edited by Kmcferrin; 01-25-2012 at 04:13 PM.
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