SteveBorough
Member
Speed tests show that my phone (HTC One) is at least double the WiFi speed of my SP2 with Bluetooth on...sad, very sad
Yup Bluetooth is a killerthey really need to change the damn chip come Surface Pro 3...
I have 120 Mbs internet. My router is a a Cisco dual band running Tomato firmware. I ran a speed test and discovered that my SP2 was only able to achieve 15 to 20 Mbs download speeds. Digging into this I discovered that the SP2 was connecting via the 2.4 GHz connection rather than the 5 GHz connection. There needs to be a driver option to have the wireless chip to prefer the 5 GHz band but there is none for this chip but that is only half of the problem. As others have mentioned there is severe 2.4 GHz interference when bluetooth is running because it also operates on 2.4 GHz frequencies, although other chip manufactures seem to have worked out the issues because my other computers do not suffer from this problem. The work around for me (in my home at least) was to have the 5 GHz channel on a unique SSID there by forcing the SP2 to use a 5 GHz channel. This is not ideal because I am now not able to seamlessly roam to a 2.4 GHz channel when the 5 GHz channel becomes weak (5 GHz channels do not carry as far as 2.4 GHz do). I do now have 120 Mbs speeds however. This doesn't help me much when I travel as most hotels and hotspots are 2.4 GHz only.
I hope this is an issue that Marvell and Microsoft can work out by improving the driver. If the hardware design is flawed, I am afraid we are hosed.
I found something that moved the needle from 65mb/s on up to 270, which is what I would expect for a dual channel N class connection.
First the bad news, your battery life might suffer if you do this. But the good news is that it was instantaneous - night and day improvement.
Wifi Properties
Configure
Advanced
Selective Suspend ---> turn it to "disable"
Now go look at your connection speed...
For me it was an instant win. Now to measure just how much I care about the impact to battery life![]()