Jesus wept. There's a line from the John Cleese film 'Clockwork' that often comes to mind at times like this - paraphrasing, "it's not the 'despair' I mind, despair I can handle, it's the 'hope' that's the killer." I had six days of hope that my wireless problems were at an end. I had been connected continuously for that long, still with the same public-IP address. Not a true test admittedly, as in that time I had also rebooted the laptop several times, flipping between old faithful Ubuntu 10.04 and the new Mint 17 install. But for all intents and purposes, the E5220 seemed to have been performing admirably.
Until yesterday that is. Last night, while web-browsing, and with a Intel 5100 <- > E5220 connection, without warning, the wireless disconnected, followed almost immediately with it reconnecting again. That in itself was unusual, particularly the speed at which it reconnected. Unfortunately, although reconnected to the E5220, there was no internet connection. Checking the E5220's connection information via the Firefox browser revealed that there was no incoming signal from the ISP, a rare occurrence, but something that had happened a few times before, so was plausable. But just disconnecting the 5100 NIC and enabling the Atheros 5008 gave me a live web-feed again - yet the E5220's connection stats. still showed there to be no ISP signal present. To restore the 5100 connection, its driver just needed to be removed & restarted via 'modprobe'.
But my suspicions had turned from the laptop's on-board NIC's to the Huawei E5220 itself. I then decided to reboot the modem via its 'Settings' options using the browser. This seemed to have no effect - I still had the same public-IP and the connection stats still showing that there was no ISP signal, despite now having a live-internet connection. I then tried resetting the E5220 to its factory defaults, again via the browser. Again, no effect. Seeing as I had a torrent on download, I left things as they were overnight, to find this morning that my download had completed, all 3gigs worth - so a perfectly healthy connection, despite what the E5220 itself thought! I had to physically switch off/on the modem, before it realised that the ISP's signal was indeed present.
So I've gone from being suspicious of NIC drivers on my laptop - rightfully so, and through much suffering! - to having my woes compounded with the knowledge that the new Huawei modems firmware is almost certainly buggy as well! One of the E5220's improvements helps confirm this, namely its battery back-up feature. Since I've got it, I have experienced at least one 'brown-out', a momentary interruption of the electricity supply, which would normally have reset my old TP-Link router, making it necessary for it to reconnect with the ISP again. Since this can't happen with the E5220, it reduces considerably the possible causes for network disconnections.
What this means is that until Huawei fixes this firmware problem, I have probably just exchanged one set of firmware bugs for another. Boo-hoo, not fair. The only plus so far that I've experienced is that I've witnessed the fastest download speeds yet with it - over 850kB/s, but only for short bursts. Most of the time it averages just 150-200kB/s.
Edit: The above little hissy-fit seems to have been
premature. A few weeks on, the E5220 has been performing exemplarily. A
rock-solid connection with no re-occurrence of the bug seen above.
What has surprised me even more has been the speed. I now regularly see
speeds of 700-950kB/s which is great! This has been using a E5220
<-> Intel 5100 connection. If ever I needed proof that the Linux
ath9k Atheros wireless drivers are buggy as hell then this must be it.
I'll continue with this problem-free setup for another while before
looking for confirmation and trying the E5220 <-> Atheros AR5008
setup.
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