In theory the Edimax USB Wifi dongles are the de-facto dongles to get if you believe the internet. Which I did. But they’ve turned out to be a pain. I have 2 of them and both drop packets like there’s no tomorrow. Check this out:
~$ ifconfig wlan0 wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 74:da:38:41:dc:ed inet addr:10.0.1.34 Bcast:10.0.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:3229099 errors:0 dropped:5125390 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:55792 errors:0 dropped:21 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:2886175343 (2.6 GiB) TX bytes:84294207 (80.3 MiB)
That is just lunacy!
Because of that I’ve been combing the internet for a solution. The best solution so far has been to add parameters to the configurations of the 8192cu kernel module that is needed for the dongle. The parameters that have decreased the packet drop for me are the following.
~$ sudo cat /etc/modprobe.d/8192cu.conf options 8192cu rtw_power_mgnt=0 rtw_enusbss=0
After the change I rebooted the pi and now I’m seeing about half as much dropped packets as before.
The search continues.