# ipw3945 packet loss and general flakiness

## volumen1

I have a Dell Latitude D620 and it has an Intel IPW3945 wireless card.  I've done some research and I've managed to get it working (sorta).  Here are my versions:

```

# uname -a && emerge -va ieee80211 ipw3945 ipw3945d wireless-tools wpa_supplicant

Linux unicron 2.6.17-gentoo-r8 #15 SMP PREEMPT Tue Dec 5 13:22:58 MST 2006 i686 Genuine Intel(R) CPU           T2500  @ 2.00GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!

[ebuild   R   ] net-wireless/ieee80211-1.2.15  USE="-debug" 0 kB 

[ebuild   R   ] net-wireless/ipw3945-1.1.2  USE="-debug" 0 kB 

[ebuild   R   ] net-wireless/ipw3945d-1.7.22-r3  58 kB 

[ebuild   R   ] net-wireless/wireless-tools-29_pre10  USE="nls -multicall" 268 kB 

[ebuild   R   ] net-wireless/wpa_supplicant-0.5.6  USE="dbus readline ssl -gsm -madwifi -qt3 -qt4" 0 kB 

```

Sometimes when I boot, I can't get the card to come up, or iwconfig will tell me that there are "no wireless extensions".  Usually, restarting ipw3945 will make that work.  However, I've noticed that using this card in both a WEP and a wide open network is marginal at best.  Pings show tons of packet loss:

```

127 packets transmitted, 53 received, 58% packet loss, time 126016ms

```

And, wget downloads seem to go in waves.  That is to say, my speeds will be decent and then they will slowly fall down to just a few bits a second (yes, bits) and then climb back up again.

I rarely boot into Windows, but I seem to see the same sort of behavior in windows as well.  So, maybe my card is just bad?   But, I wanted to trade experiences with other ipw3945 users so I can tell how much I should expect out of this card.

Has anyone replaced their ipw3945 card with another mini PCI wireless card?  I see that I can get the Dell 1390 and 1490, but based on what I've read, this will be just as kludgey.

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## no_hope

ipw3945 drivers are fishy. I don't experience performance problems but sometimes I do have to reload the module. Try to upgrade or downgrade the driver, it often helps with weird issues.

The weirdest thing I saw with that card is that if I ssh to the laptop when the card is not associated (and presumably scanning) I get high latency in ssh (i.e. about a second delay between a key stroke and an echo). Other people reported the regulatory demon eating 100% of the CPU.

ipw3945 is not a mini PCI card, it's a mini PCI-express card. There is a good chance that your laptop doesn't have any mini PCI slots if it's using an ipw3945.

If you want to upgrade, in my opinion, Atheros-based cards probably have the best driver for Linux.

edit: overall though I am pretty happy with the card.

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