Would be interesting to hear the answer to the subject question from an expert? The inbuilt wifi seems to yield very poor performance figures when compared to a £5 usb wifi dongle in the same device and wifi network. Is this because it is still a relatively new device and the drivers are still being tweaked or is the actual hardware itself of poor quality?
RPi3 onboard wifi performance - hardware or software issue?
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nickrob84 -
May 16, 2016 at 11:29 PM -
Thread is Unresolved
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Wifi performance can vary quite a lot per location, as no two environments are 100% alike. Wifi reception also depends on antenna size. So a simple usb wifi dongle with a 'normal' antenne will likely outperform an built-in antenne on the RPi's motherboard.
Example:
Chances are also that the wifi driver has not (yet) been fully optimized. Other than that, if you remotely have the option to use ethernet cable, the choice of network connectivity is a no-brainer.
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- Official Post
There was initially a problem with pi3 wifi, in that the kernel was constantly putting the wifi into sleep mode. This led to the sort of performance issues you describe. It was fixed pretty quickly, but I am not sure at what point the fix entered the libreelec builds.
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It certainly can work pretty well. This early review had good success with wireless.
Speeds of about 30Mbit/s should be possible, so not quite raw BluRay rate, but most 1080p reencodes should be possible.
But, it's wifi. It depends very much on the distance to router, what's in between and what neighbours are doing.
Best option is to install iperf, and measure the speed of the wifi link.
Probably interesting to do this both when close to the router and in the normal location, so you can see what is possible with a good signal, and what is possible with the signal you actually have.