How to Double the WiFi Speed of your OnePlus 3/3T (Under Certain Conditions)
When tweaking the software of a new smartphone, sometimes companies have to make decisions that they feel will be in the best interest of the majority of their customers.
Sometimes those decisions are ill-advised, and are fixed in OTA updates after they are pointed out. Other times there’s a legitimate reason why the default settings are set the way they are, but the benefit of modding is that we can choose to customize settings to fit our needs. We’re here to talk about one of the latter cases.
On our forums, there is a trick going around that nearly doubles your WiFi speed on the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T – and it certainly works, but only under certain conditions. Do note that the trick we will discuss below requires root access to implement.
Double your OnePlus 3/3T WiFi Speed
According to XDA Senior Member dreinulldrei, the WiFi configuration file used in the OnePlus 3 and 3T is the default one provided by Qualcomm. That’s not really an issue in and of itself, but the user discovered that the default configuration disabled channel bonding in the 2.4GHz frequency. 5GHz frequency networks have channel bonding enabled (and if you have access to this frequency, then it is advised you connect to it), but if your router only support the 2.4GHz frequency then this trick may be useful for you.
Enabling channel bonding should theoretically double your wireless throughput (as long as your router supports channel bonding), as the channel width increases from 20MHz to 40MHz. This trick is quite easy to implement, as all one needs to do is modify one line in WCNSS_qcom_cfg.ini (located in /system/etc/wifi).
Just change
gChannelBondingMode24GHz=0
to
gChannelBondingMode24GHz=1
Alternatively, you can simply use the Magisk module that can be found in the official repository to implement this patch. This fix works on all versions of Oxygen OS, provided you have root access as mentioned previously.
Users on our forums have found that indeed, modifying this line does double their wireless speeds. The screenshots below were taken from the XDA thread detailing this fix, so the credits for testing this go to those users.
As you can see, clearly this fix can double your WiFi speed. However, if you have any understanding of wireless networks, then you may know that there’s a good reason why OnePlus did not enable this feature by default. It’s because of the possibility of wireless interference. To quote a Linksys support page on this feature:
The wireless network modes for a Linksys Dual-Band router will vary depending on the frequency band(s) you choose to enable. In the 2.4 GHz frequency, the Wi-Fi signal range is divided into channels each at 5 MHz interval. Adjacent channels overlap and will interfere with each other at 20 MHz block. Setting the channel width to 40 MHz network will allow you to use 2/3 of the entire Wi-Fi band. Thus having a higher chance of overlapping and interfering with other wireless networks. Meanwhile, if you set the channel width to 20 MHz, the network will only overlap with the two channels before and after that frequency.
In essence, there is a greater possibility for wireless interference if you enable a channel width of 40MHz. The exact reason why it increases interference is more complicated than is necessary to cover in this article, but in general „40MHz wide channels over 2.4GHz is not a good idea in urban areas where there is a high density of WiFi access points“ to quote XDA Recognized Developer SultanXDA.
However, if you are located in a more rural or suburban area where there are few wireless networks to interfere with your own, this fix provides a free way to double your phone’s network speed. Try it out and let us know if it works for you!
