Inconsistent and Slow Wi-Fi Speeds on Tachyon Board

Connectivity
1

Hi everyone,

I recently received my Tachyon board and flashed it with Ubuntu 20.04. I’m using a home router with 1.5 Gbps internet. Unfortunately, I’m experiencing very inconsistent and slow Wi-Fi speeds on the Tachyon, and I’m trying to understand what’s causing this.

My Setup:

  • Tachyon OS: Ubuntu 20.04 (freshly flashed)
  • Tachyon Network: Connected via built-in Wi-Fi (no Ethernet port)
  • Phone (iPhone 15 Pro): Gets up to 350 Mbps consistently; occasionally reaches 800+ Mbps (point is to show that I'm getting high speed)
  • Tachyon Board:
    • Rarely reaches 300 Mbps, but 95% of the time drops down to 20 Mbps or even lower
    • Positioned near the router (same location as the phone)

What I’ve Tried:

  • Running speed tests through speedtest-cli and browser
  • Brought the device closer to the router but no luck

My Concern:

Since the Tachyon board has Wi-Fi 6E support, I expected it to handle high-speed connections better — ideally closer to what I get via my ethernet connection (1 gbps). But most of the time the speeds are extremely poor and inconsistent.

Questions:

  1. Is there any driver or firmware update I should apply to optimize Wi-Fi performance on Ubuntu 20.04?
  2. Could this be a hardware issue with the Tachyon board’s Wi-Fi antenna/module?
  3. Are there known issues with Wi-Fi 6E support on Linux or on this board specifically?
  4. Any tuning recommendations (e.g., power settings, kernel modules, network manager tweaks)?

Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Dian

2

Hi Diana,

Thanks for the detailed post and the great writeup of the issue!

One thing worth trying: in many cases with Linux Wi-Fi drivers (especially with NetworkManager and iwlwifi/ath drivers), power management can be overly aggressive by default, which causes exactly the type of performance instability you’re seeing - good speeds sometimes, then huge drops to very low Mbps or lots of variability.

You can disable Wi-Fi power management to test if this is contributing:

nmcli connection modify <connection_name> wifi.powersave disable

If this helps, you can make it permanent by adding a config file (as described here: https://superuser.com/questions/820995/raspberry-pi-ssh-lag/1618792#1618792):

sudo mkdir -p /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d
sudo nano /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf

And add this:

[connection]
wifi.powersave = 2

This disables Wi-Fi power save entirely - note that power consumption will go up as well! Not a lot, but its not longer operating with bounds.

Thanks

Nick

3

I tried your approach but this gave me no helpful response.

(base) particle@tachyon-b1fca402:~$ sudo nmcli connection modify TELUS1378 wifi.powersave disable 
[sudo] password for particle: 
(base) particle@tachyon-b1fca402:~$ speedtest 

   Speedtest by Ookla

      Server: EIDNet - Brooks, AB (id: 28824)
         ISP: TELUS
Idle Latency:    11.28 ms   (jitter: 1.48ms, low: 8.95ms, high: 12.56ms)
    Download:    25.94 Mbps [=/                  ]  7%   - latency: 138.89 ms

I gave a snippet of response and speed is still the same. I'm not sure why is it so slow. Any thoughts on this? Or currently this is a known issue in the board with wifi module?

4

Thanks for the update!

I will confess I tried this out multiple times with my Ubiquiti Pro 7 and it was reliably recording 600/700Mbps with the AP right above the board.

What AP are you using here? Is this mesh or just AP to internet? Wondering if this is a supplicant issue or something else going on.

It will need to wait until Monday before some experts can let us know what commands to run that will allow us to diagnose the connection.

Thanks

Nick.

5

IMG_2638.HEIC
IMG_2638.HEIC4032×3024 1.71 MB

For reference, one of my AP points is about 10 meters away (vs overhead) and I get these speeds very reliably.

So, looks like we need to debug what is going on here!

6

(the last two were on wifi - the first on ethernet)