Dell WIFI card - DELL 1550 (broadcom) is garbage?

Hey there guys,

I have recently received a pair of precision laptops - m6800 and m4800 laptop -both came with dell 1550 2g/5g wifi cards.

However i encountered some major problems running these wifi cards - very slow speed (not more than 3 mb/s download), ping spikes and so on..

Already tried all available drivers, changed lots of settings.. Disabled low power settings everywhere possible.. Tried forcing single band in driver settings - nothing helps..

After replacing one of the cards with Dell 1705 2g wifi adapter - i got not very stable, but decent 8-10 mb/s downloads.. No major ping spikes..

So the question is - are these wifi cards really that garbage, or i am doing something wrong?

 

Well the card isn't garbage itself (hardwarewise), it's just the drivers are terrible. You're not doing anything wrong, it's just typical Dell support. You can try and roam around the internet and find modded drivers that aren't complete garbage.

 

My experience with Dell WiFi card is always poor, I have those problems for long time and can't find out the problem until i replace the Dell card. This applies to Dell Bluetooth card as well, just poor quality. Switch to intel card solved everything. Could be driver problem as Danishblunt said, but I just avoid their cards including WWAN too.

 

You could try the Dell 1601 - I've been quite happy with the performance of mine.

 

There is also no bios lock on third party adapters, so you could get a not too expensive good adapter for the laptops as well.

EDIT: Also, never forget that your transfer speeds over the network will only be as good as your networking equipment.

When you say 8-10 mb/s, do you mean megabytes of megabits because the two are entirely different. 8-10 megabytes isn't too bad depending on your network environment. If you're on 2.4 GHz with only one or two streams, that isn't too bad actually.

If you have an AC router, I'd recommend getting an AC adapter and you should see a noticeable increase in speed if you weren't saturating your Internet connection before.

 

The 5ghz on my 1550 was... shoddy, to say the least. Kept disconnecting from my Zyxel router damn near all the time, and when it WOULD connect (and stay connected), i'm not sure Windows ever showed more than 400Mbps allegedly. Transfer rates from a gigabit-connected desktop, if memory serves, hovered around the 9MB/s area. Tried several driver versions, both from Dell, as well as HP and Lenovo, for the BCM4352 which the 1550 is based on.

A few months back i decided i had had enough, and sprang for an Intel 7260AC (you'll wanna be careful, there are 2.4GHz-only 7260's too), and it's been smooth sailing ever since. Hasn't dropped the connection once, Windows consistently shows 520-866Mbps, and 40-50MB/s (megabytes per second) transfer rates. Some of the best 15-20$ i've spent in a very long time.