What's going on here? I ran "iwconfig wlan0 rate auto" which made it briefly claim a rate of "130 Mb/s" but then it reported 1Mb/s again. 1Mb/s rate for the Wifi connection would be expected to give something like 40KB/s FTP transfer speed so it seems that the phones are connecting in the same way as my laptop.
It says that "abgn" is supported which should give lots of options for rates higher than 1Mb/s, especially when the quality is 70/70 and the Wifi access point (a Netgear DGN 2200 ADSL modem) is about 2M away from my laptop with nothing of note in between.
Did you ever take any of those readings before the problem started? It's been years since I had to look at wireless on Linux (outside of OpenWRT), but at the time the signal quality measurements were never useful in any way.
Any suggestions for what I can do to improve performance?
I'd start with identifying what might have changed. The weather has warmed up here (central vic) over the last few days - has your house/office been warmer lately? Has someone erected a large bronze statue next to the router? What channel are you set to? Try changing it. Maybe your neighbors have bought some new wireless hardware (baby monitors are supposedly great for disrupting the 2.4GHz spectrum!) Can you turn off the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz radios in the router independently? In my experience they are normally different radio's and bridged together in software. Failing any of that, can you get another wireless access point to try? James