[Arm-netbook] Slow/stuttering wifi on Mele-A2000

[Stefan Monnier]

I'm using a Mele-A2000 with stock Android-4.0.4 firmware and Debian in
a chroot (courtesy of LilDebi) and I'm seeing weird stuttering on the
wifi connection: e.g. communication between the Mele and my laptop might
proceed happily at around 1MB/s for a while, and then freeze for
a second or two, or slow down to 100KB/s.  I know it could be
interference from outside sources, but I don't experience such behavior
between other machines in my wifi network.

Also, ifconfig gives me unexpectedly high rates of dropped RX packets,
such as:

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:16:00:03:18:c4  
          inet addr:192.168.1.85  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::216:ff:fe03:18c4/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:6858 errors:0 dropped:7049 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:3681 errors:0 dropped:1 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:629525 (614.7 KiB)  TX bytes:2155471 (2.0 MiB)

The puzzling part is that the ratio (in this case 7049/6858) stays
pretty much stable over time.  The signal quality is supposed to be
good:

wlan0     IEEE 802.11bg  ESSID:"foo"  Nickname:"<WIFI at REALTEK>"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.457 GHz  Access Point: 00:28:4F:BC:A5:95   
          Bit Rate:54 Mb/s   Sensitivity:0/0  
          Retry:off   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****   Security mode:open
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=100/100  Signal level=-52 dBm  Noise level=0 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

("Link Quality", "Sensitivity", and "Noise level" don't seem to provide
valid data, tho).  Does someone have an idea what might be going on, or
where I might find someone who does?


        Stefan