WIFI Router Channel effects battery life - HTC EVO 3D

Ever since I got this phone a month after it was release I've had odd problems with WIFI at home.
I have a Linksys WRT350N running DD-WRT.
As soon as got the phone the WIFI/Router would get sluggish and hang.
Sometimes I'd see the phone looping. Connecting and losing connection.
Reboot the router and all was fine for a few days.
Finally I spent some time sorting it out.
I had it on Channel 6 (default) but I had TurboBoost (not sure why) on and I had 40Mhz bandwidth which can speed things up but can be more prone to interference.
Finally I gave up on the speed and turned off turboboost, put it on the normal 20Mhz and found the cleanest channel (channel 1).
Everything ran perfect now. Except the phone. It was sucking battery like crazy. Normally I'd have half the battery left by bed time. I could go 2 days in a pinch.
Now by 8PM it was beeping because battery was critically low.
So I tried Channel 11.
Now the phone is fine. It's 8PM and I still have 92% (it was a light day) but before it didn't matter how much I used it.
In summary:
Router is pretty much default and on channel 11, Good battery and stable.
Router is pretty much default and on Channel 1 it suck battery and stable.
Router tweaked for bandwidth on wireless N on Channel 6. Good Battery (sometimes, very unstable)
I'm not saying some this isn't the routers fault, but the only change I last made on the router was from channel 1 to 11. And that made a night and day difference in battery.
Perhaps there was interference in channel 1 that made the phone work harder.
Channel 6 might be fine too, I did not try it again with Turbo-Off and 20Mhz bandwidth since it's all working I'll leave well enough alone.
I'm running cleanrom 2.9.5 (I've run various versions of clean rom most of the time I've had it).

Is that a dual band router 2.4 and 5 if it is turn off 5 ghz I had similar problem on my dlink 655 as well turning off 5 solved problem
Sent from my PG86100 using Tapatalk

Related

Extremely Low Wifi signal

I could be standing next to my wireless router and be getting 1 or 2 bars on my wireless signal. Does anyone else get poor wifi reception on their Wizard?
i.ve never really checked wifi signal strength wifi has always worked very well.
what rom are you using? it could be a bug in the rom if you have flashed a custom rom.
Rom issue?
I'm not sure if this has something to do with the rom, but try TNT's 19213 WM6.1. I've got no problems with finding and getting connected to our network. The reception is not great (when i compare it to my laptop) but it is works.
The approx. max. distance between my wizard and our router is 25 meter, on this distance I still can connect but its not verry stable. For a stable connection the approx. max distance is about 15 meter.

SGS2 + Dlink DIR-655 = Battery Drain on Wifi

Following many SGS2 battery drain threads, I've come to this conclusion that it is due to the rare combo of SGS2 with certain routers. This might be what the AOS bug is all about.
With newer kernels we are no longer able to see this drain easily on BetterBatteruStats. Instead, I've used SystemTunerPro to do many many recordings at 1 minute intervals to record the CPU usage with wifi on/off, with my regular set up, and with a bare rom with nothing else installed.
My findings: with a freshly installed rom or not, as soon as wifi is connected to my Dlink DIR-655, the CPU usage increases from roughly 0.3% to 1% (averaged over a 10-minute sampling period with screen off, background sync off), which drops back down as soon as wifi is turned off. More interesting, when the Dlink router is out of range, turning on wifi does NOT drain the battery.
I was puzzled by the result, so I went to a local coffee shop and connect to the public wifi access point, no increase with CPU usage whether on wifi or 3g only. So something is wrong with the Dlink DIR-655.
So, following some searches, this seems to be a somewhat recognized issue by some SGS2 owners (not too may because I bet not many would not suspect that the router could be the culprit). I tried changing from auto channel to CH8...11, changing from wireless N to G, changing authentication from wpa to wep to open, each time I change something, I made a new recording with wifi on compared to wifi off. Same thing. Only when connected to my Dlink DIR-655 does the drain occur.
Note: you cannot tell if your battery is being drained by just analyzing your wakelocks. In this wifi battery drain test, no wakelock stands out in terms of time on CPU. But if you use battery monitor widget pro, you can leave your screen off and let it plot. If with screen off your current draw is 100mh or above, here you have a battery drain. Your phone can very well be in "deep sleep" when this happens.
What to do:
I use JuiceDefender to make sure wifi is turned off when screen is off. You should set wifi sleep policy to never. Even though you could set it to turn off when screen is off, sometimes wifi cannot be turned off successfully using this method. When that happens battery drains without you knowing. This is why people have a fully charged phone before going to sleep and wake up with a dead battery.
Now it's your turn to share your experiences. If your SGS2 drains battery:
Do you have a Dlink router?
Do you have a DIR-655?
Or do you have this router by but have no battery drain.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk
I have the same problem with my DIR 655 and SGS2. In 18 hours with WIFI on, Android OS was top process with around 9h runtime. I also changed the WPA, channel etc. settings without result. Currently I want to downgrade the router firmware from 1.35NA to 1.21. In BBS, if I order the kernel wakelock by count I get one for about 140K, and it's active only when connected to wireless. I think the router doesn't let the SGS2 to sleep for more than several hundred miliseconds. You may play with advanced wireless settings in the router and change the Beacon Period and DTIM Interval values. I only hope that DLink will address this issue.
Cheers
Hi Sysod,
Did changing thevbeacon period solve your issue? Or downgrading router firmware to 1.21. From the Dlink changelog I don't see how it can improve our situation.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk
I have played a bit with beacon settings without succes. I noticed a decrease in battery drain, but also a decrease in wireless performance and I stopped tweaking. I'll see if dlink do something about it or else I'll buy a new router. The firmware to my router can't be downgraded, unfortunately, even with the russian modified one.:banghead:
Thinking I'm having this problem myself.
While researching I found this
http://forums.dlink.com/index.php?topic=38655.0
ehrw said:
Thinking I'm having this problem myself.
While researching I found this
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Why I didn't think of this? After reading that thread, I fired up Wireshark on the laptop. I found many broadcast ARP packets originating from my 2 PCs. The culprit was the Cannon scanner software. After I disabled it, no more broadcasts and no more battery drain. Android OS is still high, but this might be a fault in reading.
Cheers
This router is terrible. I have had so many issue with it as well as mobile/laptop battery drain.
I just got a new router (not from Dlink) and battery levels consumption is what I would call normal, as in what I would get at work/wifi AP.
I guess this about confirm the combination of dlink dir 655 and sgs2 is bad for battery. I was going bonkers with my battery flat out in few hours once connected to my dir655.
Without connecting to wifi, based battery usage apps, I can get about 1% for 20-23 minutes and it took 1% for 6 minutes with wifi connected.
Now that I found this thread, I will be using my older 150n linksys/Cisco, for the next few hours to check if this is really a dlink issue combo with android since my son battery on his galaxy mini and the older galaxy s also flat out in less than 10 hours.
wcg707 said:
I guess this about confirm the combination of dlink dir 655 and sgs2 is bad for battery. I was going bonkers with my battery flat out in few hours once connected to my dir655.
Without connecting to wifi, based battery usage apps, I can get about 1% for 20-23 minutes and it took 1% for 6 minutes with wifi connected.
Now that I found this thread, I will be using my older 150n linksys/Cisco, for the next few hours to check if this is really a dlink issue combo with android since my son battery on his galaxy mini and the older galaxy s also flat out in less than 10 hours.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So, did it help?
DLink DIR-615, same issue, I was about to RMA the phone!
PS:
My fix with an updated DLink DIR-615: change WPA2 Protection from TKIP+AES to AES (TKIP only did not work with my i9100). In G Only it seemed draining even less (quick test), but I got this router for N+G and it seems working now.
Changing the DTIM interval from 1 to 255 solved the issue for me.
Had a battery loss of ~4% in 6-7 hours.
Let me know if this worked for you.
Gr,
Deva
I too am having this issue, but not on every single ROM that I run. I have a SII and so does my wife, running different ROMs. My phone has this battery drain problem with the Blu Kuban Kernal where I did not see it before. My wife is running Calkins old GB Rom and does not seem to have the issue. Changing the DTIM interval from 1 to 255 did not solve the issue for me, although it did seem to help. My phone stayed in deep sleep mode about 5 percent moer after changing this setting.
I think you should find Elins tech.szelins.com

Testing connection speed with the Prime, how, why?

I have been making lots of tests with the Prime, especially because of the "known issue" with WiFi/BT.
Now regardless the issue and regardless whether or not BT is on/off, it seems that all tests shows that the speed is always better in the upload than in the download.
I have fibre 34/32 mbit and the values I got for my laptop are always the same in WiFi or Wired 34,75 down 32 m/bit up.
With the Prime instead, except if I am 2-3 meter from the Router, the upload speed is twice or more faster than the download, and I have nothing else running, no syncing, or else. All auto updates are not is use, so no bandwidth is used.
I have the Prime in use about 40 feet from the router and this difference is even more noticeable. The more away the bigger the gap, and weird is always the upload that is better.
I tested with Speed test.net, and the test from my provider too.
Any idea why?

'Best WiFi Performance' Option -- Stops wireless drops

I've searched and saw a bunch of BS about this option.
Here's what I've found.
1. When you turn it on, it's beats your battery. About 4% battery drain per hour vs >1% for normal wifi from what I've seen.
2. It doesn't make your wifi 'faster'
3. What it does do, it fixes the wifi disconnect issue.
#3 expanded. Some EVOLTEs(maybe all) drop wifi when you're far away from the access point. For me it takes just being downstairs to get drops.
If I'm in the same room as the AP, no drops, don't need this option. If I'm far away from the AP and I'm playing an online game and I keep getting kicked, this option will fix that. If I had to guess at what this option does, it must turn up the broadcast strength of the wireless card.
What I've done is I made a shortcut to the wifi settings menu. 2 clicks to turn it on and off.
Turn it on when needed, off when done.
If someone made a widget for it, that would be badass.
I've found just the opposite, it actually makes my disconnect issue worse.
Found this out myself about a week ago. Fixes my issues as well.
Sent from my EVO using Tapatalk 2
I had that turned on for a while because it sounded pretty harmless but it KILLED my battery life. I couldn't figure out where this huge drain was coming from, I would be losing an extra 20% throughout the day and 10-15% overnight. I suppose if you're really having wifi issues it would be worth it, but IMO I would download Wifi Analyzer and see if you're having interference issues and change the wifi channel.
Toast95135 said:
IMO I would download Wifi Analyzer and see if you're having interference issues and change the wifi channel.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
+1 That's what I did and found the default channel 6 to be super crowded. I moved to channel 9 (most unused for me) and ALL my wifi issues, not just my phone, went away.
Sent from my EVO using xda premium
Toast95135 said:
IMO I would download Wifi Analyzer and see if you're having interference issues and change the wifi channel.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Toast95135, thank you for the info on this app. This fixed all my WiFi issues in my house too. I thought that mine was sharing a lot of channels with the neighbors. I was sharing the same channel with about 3 of my neighbors. No wonder I was having so many issues. My WiFi is also a lot faster.
Thanks again! I hit the ty button too. I wish I knew of this app about a year ago. :good:
.jond said:
I've searched and saw a bunch of BS about this option.
Here's what I've found.
1. When you turn it on, it's beats your battery. About 4% battery drain per hour vs >1% for normal wifi from what I've seen.
2. It doesn't make your wifi 'faster'
3. What it does do, it fixes the wifi disconnect issue.
#3 expanded. Some EVOLTEs(maybe all) drop wifi when you're far away from the access point. For me it takes just being downstairs to get drops.
If I'm in the same room as the AP, no drops, don't need this option. If I'm far away from the AP and I'm playing an online game and I keep getting kicked, this option will fix that. If I had to guess at what this option does, it must turn up the broadcast strength of the wireless card.
What I've done is I made a shortcut to the wifi settings menu. 2 clicks to turn it on and off.
Turn it on when needed, off when done.
If someone made a widget for it, that would be badass.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
From my own research I found that changing the wifi frequency to 2.4 ghz fixes the disconnects.
Sent from my EVO

What is more energy efficient? 3G running constantly, or Wifi running constantly?

As many know, you can set the phone to turn wifi off when the screen is off, this means it will default to using the 3G for data. As someone with unlimited data, either or will do for me.
However, is it actually more energy efficient for it to be running off the wifi rather than 3G? I noticed when wifi is enabled always, the 3G signal is hardly used at all.
wifi should be more efficient even if you leave it on when the screen is off. the difference between long range transmission (cell) and shorter range (wifi) is big.
you can also test it out yourself. play on your phone for a few hours a day, 1 day with wifi off (completely relying on 3g) and the other day with wifi on all day. see how much power you have left.

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