Speed up a WiFI interface ??

[Bernhard Frühmesser <borsti@a1.net>]

Hello,

For a friend i setup a small RAID-1 config using Wheezy on one of his 
old machines, just to backup his most important stuff. Unfortunately the 
location where the box is placed can not be reached via cable because of 
building conditions, so only Wireless is possible.

I have installed package "firmware-ralink" for the network card and 
these modules are loaded after reboot:

rt2800pci
rt2800lib
rt2x00pci

After using wpa_passphrase and adding wlan0 to /etc/network/interfaces 
all works so far, the client get´s an ip from the dhcp server, can copy 
stuff and so on.

The Problem is that it´s extremely slow.

The WLAN-Router is setup to support 11bgn mixed mode, channel bandwith 
"audo" and max transfer rate 150Mbit/s.

But when i check the client side with iwconfig i get this:

wlan0     IEEE 802.11bgn  ESSID:"My friends SSID"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.462 GHz  Access Point:MAC-Adress
          Bit Rate=58.5 Mb/s   Tx-Power=20 dBm
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=45/70  Signal level=-65 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:5788  Invalid misc:58   Missed beacon:0

The wlan-card is supposed to support 150Mbit/s as well.

I have tested and position the box right next to the wlan-Router but 
this doesn´t help much except the Link Quality is then 70/70.

I have used iptraf to check for the data rates and the overall input 
rate for this interface is about 5,8 Mbit/s which is not even 5% of the 
max (theoretical) speed. I know that the max speed of a WLAN is never 
reached but 5,8 Mbit/s overall speed seems very slow to me - no?

Anything i can do to speed this up?

Thanks,

BF.