Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Intel 5300 AGN Wireless Network adapter drops connection in Win7

When connecting to a wireless N-Network my Xt2 drops quite often connection if certain amounts of data are transferred, i.e. mostly when the data rate is quite high > 5 MB/s.
Following different suggestions about disabling powermanagement, N-Network compatibility and even encryption, I tried different settings in the device driver in Win7.
Basically I changed just one entry:
Fat Channel Intolerant
and the disconnects went away.
Intels states to Fat Cannel Intolerant:
Fat Channel Intolerant
This setting communicates to surrounding networks that this Wi-Fi adapter is not tolerant of 40MHz channels in the 2.4GHz band. The default setting is for this to be disabled (turned off) so that the adapter does not send this notification.
Note These settings are available only if the adapter is an Intel® WiMAX/WiFi Link 5350, Intel® WiMAX/WiFi Link 5150, Intel® WiFi Link 5300, Intel® WiFi Link 5100 or Intel® Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN.

Source:

My opinion is, that the driver did not send this properly, got a wide 40 Mhz Channel and then dropped out.
This often occurs, if the data rate is increasing and quite large in order to ensure maximum bandwidth.
Any comments appreciated that would clear up this behaviour. Even more interesting would be some insights how this behaves in Linux.

/edit

Still the disconnects occur, but not so often.

/edit

With the newest driver from the dell Homepage the problems are gone till now. (27.08.2010)

/edit

It works till now with the current driver 3.15.0 directly from the Intel Homepage

/edit 19.09.2011

Finally I did a reinstall  of Win7 due to some other concerns (Partitioning etc.) and with the default Win7 or Windows Update Driver it works completely flawless since 2 weeks.

Maybe the installs and uninstalls flawed something in the networking, basically, I don't care.