This might be answered in one of the long and tortured battery life threads, but I was wondering if having Wifi power saving mode enabled on a connection can possibly impact download speed.

I say this because I've been having problems with dropped connections / incredibly slow speeds as Ive used my n900 around campus, went in and disabled power saving, and the podcast I was trying to download went from 80 kb/s to 300.

Ill have to test it some more; the wifi on campus is quite dodgy, so it could be anything. Has anyone else experienced benefits from disabling wifi power saving?

Hmm. As said before do not use lower power mode. The default mode adapts to current network strength. Some people have reported that they got lower battery consumption, but on general it´s not good idea (as you have noticed) to force lower power mode.

mine came with power saving on as default, was tempted to turn it off because every other wifi device in the house seems to take priority over my n900 and often kicks me off my connection. but the warning that disabling power saving would increase power usage significantly scared me off!

It was also enabled by default on mine. If it affects priority that might explain a lot -- Im sure there are lots of heavy users hanging out in the library right next to me on laptops that were hogging the bandwidth.

what your describing sounds like a form of QoS prioritization, i cant really see how that would effect power usage other than by being slower less power is required to run wifi

I run mine on intermediate power saving.

Full power saving limits upstream to approx 600 kb/s set to intermediate I get 1300 kb/s upstream. downstream seems un affected.

hope this helps you decide.

Only really matters if you're saving stuff to a NAS drive or a share on a pc via a samba (wizrd mounter) share.

any idea how to up my priority then? almost every time the ps3 goes on or reconnects i have to disable and restart my connection!

well imve switched to medium power saving now and if theres any noticable difference i'll report back here!

If you losing your connection randomly, I experienced this too, I had to stop using wpa security on my homehub and drop back to using a 64 bit wep key. This stopped me randomly being left 'connected' but having no access to the internet. Think this ones a nokia bug with PR1.1

ok, got chance to play around with it a bit more. Disabling power saving seems to have increased total power consumption noticebly;; eyeballing my battery-eye graph Id say by 10-15 percent compared to a time of similar usage yesterday (while connected, with email polling every 30 minutes and some internet desktop widgets, light browsing)

I did some speed tests, first with it off and then with it back on (using a gpodder to get podcasts as the test, as I want to get some on the phone before I head to the gym -- but please let me know of any other more reliable non-flash speed tests I could do):

Results were sporadic, but speed in general is much better than before, seems like I had lower lows with power saving on, but I hit highs of 1100 kbs down both with it on and with it off, so it definitely wasnt throttling it before. Campus is starting to empty so I think lower traffic is responsible for the generally higher speeds.

So I guess it was just an erratic network. dj_steve, so what you're saying is that wifi power settings shouldnt effect prioritzation? i.e. shouldnt result in slower speeds on a network experiencing heavy traffic from non-power saving devices?

At any rate, Im leaving it on max. When I get home Ill test some more under more reliable conditions.

edit: @zarf Yes I drop connections often; on campus its unsecured (with a browser-based log in), but I also drop connections at home, so Ill try out your suggestions