Created attachment 155248 [details] Network details on the 5 GHz band, with WPA2-PSK authentication type SUMMARY Some of the Wireless network details are wrong. To be more exact these are: - Security type Connection speed STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Switch from WPA Supplicant to IWD, if on Debian, following Debian's tutorial here: https://wiki.debian.org/NetworkManager/iwd 2. Reboot to make sure everything has been restarted properly 3. Connect to your wireless network, from iwctl, like in the tutorial at step 1 4. Open the networks widget from the System tray 5. Click on the connected network 6. Click on the Details tab OBSERVED RESULT Security type shows as: Unknown security type compared to WPA2-PSK (on default WPA Supplicant) Connection speed shows as: 1 MBit/s fo a 2.4 GHz network and 6 MBit/s for a 5 GHz network (both same as on default WPA Supplicant) EXPECTED RESULT 1.) About security type: The Security type should show WPA2-PSK, as on WPA supplicant, when this is the security type used. Since nothing was changed on the router side regarding the security type, changing from WPA Supplicant to IWD should show the same thing. 2.) About connection speed: The connection speed should show any value up to 300 MBit/s for the 2.4 GHz band and up to 433 MBit/s for the 5 GHz band SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Linux/KDE Plasma: KDE Plasma Version: 5.26.5 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.101.0 Qt Version: 5.15.7 OS: Debian 12 Kernel: 6.1.0-1-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.4-1 (2023-01-07) x86_64 GNU/Linux ADDITIONAL INFORMATION Router used for testing: Archer C20 v1 00000002: Which should have a maximum speed of 300 Mbps, on 2.4 GHz band and 433 Mbps, on 5 GHz band: https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/wifi-router/archer-c20/ Transmit power set to High and the laptop 3 meters away, in direct view, no obstacles in between. 2.4 GHz band set to b/g/n mixed (there's no n only) put on a a little overlapping channel. 5 GHz band set to 11a/n/ac (there's no ac only) put on a channel that is not overlapping any other network as it's the only 5 GHz network around.
Using IWD's iwctl tool and inside the command: station wlan0 show Gives for the 2.4 GHz band something like: https://imgur.com/8BSfBBg And for the 5 GHz band something like: https://i.imgur.com/JSOWcwj.png It looks to me that Plasma network de details takes its "Connection speed" value from this TxBitrate but it's very far away from the maximum connection speed that the network can sustain. Unfortunately I have only a 100 Mbps internet connection to test but these are the results of speed tests... Done on the 2.4 GHz band: https://i.imgur.com/QeVH0Z1.png And on the 5 GHz band: https://i.imgur.com/3F7OV7U.png So the current 1 MBit/s for the 2.4 GHz band and 6 MBit/s are clearly not true an nowhere near to the reality in both download and upload speed.
To optimize the router and wireless connection, I recommend LinSSID: https://sourceforge.net/projects/linssid/ And to monitor and test the wireless connection, I recommend WaveMon: https://github.com/uoaerg/wavemon At least these are the tools that I used. WaveMon seems to even be able to provide a more accurate connection speed on the 2.4 GHz band: https://i.imgur.com/l3alGp9.png 150 Mbps is half from the 300 Mps the router is able to do on this band, but there are many 2.4 GHz networks around. And on the 5 GHz band: https://i.imgur.com/hsGWC1g.png 433 Mbps is exactly like the maximum the router is able to do on this band, but there are no other 5 GHz networks around LinSSID shows that this is the only one on this frequency.
Are you able to verify what you see in nmcli? ` nmcli connection show $connectionIdHere$` If this has the wrong values then this is an issue at a NetworkManager layer rather than us.
This command (copied-pasted): ` nmcli connection show $connectionIdHere$` Gives me this out put: Error: $ - no such connection profile. I tried even without backticks and the initial space and gives me the exactly the same thing. But I got the idea, searched a bit and found 2 tutorials with more commands to try: https://devconnected.com/network-manager-on-linux-with-examples/#Network_Manager_Tools https://www.makeuseof.com/connect-to-wifi-with-nmcli/ And this command: nmcli connection show Gives this output: NAME UUID TYPE DEVICE test-network-5G 1591fc1d-9ba7-49c8-aaf0-2467f0fb4c8b wifi wlan0 Wired connection 1 5d6ca78a-fd5c-3408-b98f-92d85559d6ea ethernet -- This command: nmcli connection show --active Gives this output: NAME UUID TYPE DEVICE test-network-5G 1591fc1d-9ba7-49c8-aaf0-2467f0fb4c8b wifi wlan0 This command (to get the connected network signal strength): nmcli -f IN-USE,SIGNAL device wifi Gives this output (* is for the one that I'm connected to): IN-USE SIGNAL 100 100 99 * 73 52 40 37 32 30 27 24 This command(): nmcli dev wifi list Gives this output (removed all but the connected one): IN-USE BSSID SSID MODE CHAN RATE SIGNAL BARS SECURITY * 37:AC:D2:FF:E9:RA test-network-5G Infra 48 65 Mbit/s 72 ▂▄▆_ WPA2 The "RATE" is definitely wrong as it shows 65 Mbit/s for all the networks, even from my other network in the 2.4 GHz band which from my speed tests is definitely not as good as the 5 GHz one that I'm connected and even for my neighbors ones, two of them that have 100% signal strength compared to 72-73 in mine.
I have done a few more tests with the latest versions of the following distros: Nobara (KDE + Gnome) Manjaro (KDE + Gnome + Cinnamon + XFCE) All show the same things as in Debian: Connection speed (link speed): 1 Mb/s for the 2.4 GHz band 6 Mb/s for the 5.2 GHz band Other than that, the only difference is that Gnome and Cinnamon show security as WPA2, compared to KDE that shows it as WPA2-PSK (which matches perfectly the router's web page where is shows that "Authentication Type:" is "WPA2-PSK") which is as precise as possible. XFCE (on Manjaro) cannot identify it as accurately and it shows WPA / WPA2 / WPA3, but it also has an additional field called "Driver" that is equal to "ath10k_pci". Which I assume it matches this PCI item: Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 31) So wherever the problem is, it must be somewhere that is common for most distros. From what I saw after these tests and assuming that all these distros use both WPA Supplicant and Network Manager I would say that the problem should be in one of these two. I didn't have time to replace again WPA Supplicant with IWD on all these live boots, like I did on my Debian install. But if we do that and the problem is still persists, like on Debian, then the problem might be in Network Manager.
OK, seeing that the connection speed seems to match the "Bit Rate", I tried to find out if I can change either the bit rate or the transmission power manually to see if the bit rate in Network Manager changes. The defaults for the active connection can be seen with this command: sudo iwconfig wlan0 Which in my case gives: Bit Rate=6 Mbit/s Tx-Power=30 dBm It seems that changing the bit rate is impossible no matter why I try and this answer here seems to confirm that changing the bit rate on a Qualcomm atheros chipset, like I have, even though it's not exactly the same mode, it's impossible: https://superuser.com/a/1271812 But doing the following commands: sudo ifconfig wlan0 down sudo iwconfig wlan0 txpower 20 sudo ifconfig wlan0 up Then checking the that transmission power changed sudo iwconfig wlan0 And repeat them, setting at each repeat the tx power to 15, 10, 5 and finally to 1 worked! While the receive rate in WaveMon shows even 433.3 Mb/s (the maximum for my access point) and less, the transmission rate doesn't budge from the 6 Mbit/s even though the different power levels were used and confirmed by both iwconfig and wavemon commands. The guy in the link above fixed it by upgrading the access point's firmware to the latest version, but mine it's already at the latest version and sow it's the firmware for my wireless adapter in my laptop that Debian uses.
I had the chance to recently test this on another laptop with a Realtek firmware and there it was the speeds reported were higher. So I guess this depends on the firmware reporting the right thing. I think this bug report can be closed.
Bulk transfer as requested in T17796