Slow Network Download Speeds Using USB Wireless Dongle

[dequire]

Right now I am forced to use a less than desirable internet solution, bandwidth-wise. Even so, I expect around a 1M pipe up and down. After testing over a few days and at different times, I have noticed that while my upload speeds appear to be normal, my download speeds appear crippled. Additionally, signal drops / loss are commonplace. This may not be a Linux / Hardware / driver thing (although it likely is), but I have no Windows partition at the moment to test. As shown below the correct driver module (r8712u) is loaded. Does anyone know of a cause of such a thing, or have experienced something like this in the past? Based on Realtek's less-than-ideal Linux support, and the fact that the (Debian & Ubuntu) included Kernel-driver has been in 'staging' forever, would it maybe be beneficial to compile the latest driver myself? Another option, of course, would be to just get a new adapter that's more "Linux friendly". However, I would like to get to the bottom of this issue ideally. Ideas welcome.

james@james-KubuntuLTS:~$ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0bda:8172 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8191SU 802.11n WLAN Adapter

[   17.913723] usb 2-3: r8712u: MAC Address from efuse = d8:eb:97:28:60:dd
[   17.913726] usb 2-3: r8712u: Loading firmware from "rtlwifi/rtl8712u.bin"

[SecretCode]

Is there any way you can connect using an ethernet cable to your broadband router? To confirm the problem is with your wireless and not with the ISP.

Do you have a wireless-capable phone or tablet or anything else that can run a speed test over wireless? To isolate whether it's a low quality wireless access point in the router (lots of them are pretty poor). Experiencing dropouts could indicate this.

If it is in fact just this device with this adapter ... I don't have much good experience of getting better drivers ... but one config thing that I've found useful in the past is to adjust the MTU. I can't find a good explanation of this just now but this page gives some basics: Changing MTU to Make WiFi Faster on Linux - SysTutorials.