Poor wireless performance on RTL8188CE

tel0s · n00b Joined: 08 May 2013 Posts: 2

Hi all,

I've been battling with my wireless for quite some number of weeks now, as it's very strange in behaviour.

Generally, when connecting to standard home AP's it works flawlessly, however when connecting to AP's used at my place of work, various things can happen with seemingly no pattern which might indicate a cause:

- Sometimes wont connect at all, and keeps presenting me with the password entry dialogue
- More often than not it connects flawlessly, then after a short period of time (ranging from minutes to a couple of hours) either remains connected but stops responding/slows to a halt
- random disconnects
- Poor network throughput to a point where it's unuseable.
- connects, but says "successfully connected to network (None)" - sometimes functionally, sometimes not.

I'm using NetworkManager, with the rtl8192ce driver.

I've read the following posts which indicated a few possible problems with my configuration:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-955672-highlight-rtl8188ce.html
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-939394-highlight-rtl8188ce.html

From my debugging I've attempted today, I've made some headway. until this morning I was unable to use iwlist to scan for networks, however, I determined that this was caused by a kernel misconfiguration as I did not have the wext compatibility layer for cfg80211 enabled. This allowed me to scan manually and identify networks. I've no idea what allowed NetworkManager to scan for them before this point.

Furthermore, I've modified my udev rules such that NetworkManager is now starting wpa_supplicant with nl80211 as a driver, rather than the default of wext.

The changes I've made dont seem to have had any effect on my connectivity problems whatsoever.

My colleagues using Linux are having the same problems (Gentoo,Gentoo, and Debian respectively), however windows devices are unaffected. (all devices are using the same wireless chipset)

Again, the issues only seem to arise on networks which have multiple AP's per SSID.

Any ideas? It's imperative I get this fixed.

lspci -v

khayyam

tel0s · n00b Joined: 08 May 2013 Posts: 2

khayyam · Posted: Thu May 09, 2013 9:48 am Post subject:

tel0s ...

sorry, I completely missed you were using NetworkManager ... can't help ITR.

best ... khay

consus · n00b Joined: 27 Aug 2012 Posts: 38

Drasica · Apprentice Joined: 16 Apr 2006 Posts: 181

I'm having extremely similar issues--my RTL8188CE device connects fine to many networks, but not to my work network (which has multiple APS). However, I have been able to connect to some of the multi-AP networks at my university so multi-AP is not a pure indicator. I also get presented the password entry dialog multiple times, and get connected to (None). Sometimes I actually do manage to get connected to the network I intend to (and assigned an IP/DNS), but as soon as anything tries to actually use the network (i.e. ping) it disconnects.

When I look at message, I consistently get a "Deauthenticating by local choice (reason=3)" error.

If you have made any headway, please let me know! It has been extremely frustrating to have to boot up into windows to use the network in certain locations.

Note: this is on 3.8.13. I e-mailed the linux-wireless list who suggested I use backports (formerly known as wireless-compat). Using backports, my driver code went up to 3.11-r3 (and even a recent snapshot), but neither showed improvement.

666threesixes666 · Posted: Tue Aug 13, 2013 12:36 am Post subject:

my rtl 8187L is doing this too... i got around it by getting a wna 1100 ath9k_htc for 5 bucks. (found by this list)

http://linux-wless.passys.nl/query_chipset.php?chipset=Atheros

possibly disable QoS support for your device in kernel & change channels.

(arch people have problems with this too... https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=77844 & https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/10815)