carabennemsi

Your all work on improving the driver is highly appreciated and we're looking forward to integrate a more advanced driver version once ready. But I think we should clearly state that wonders do not happen. This is ultra cheap crappy Wi-Fi regardless of driver quality. Expecting something like 50 Mbits/sec throughput at the application layer is a clear sign that the whole Wi-Fi technology is not understood. 
Single antenna low power Wi-Fi in 2.4 GHz band is great to send some sensor data around but please don't expect 'throughput' with this 'as cheap as possible' type of wireless device.
 
Regarding PHY rate and 'throughput' reading through http://80211notes.blogspot.de/2014/03/phy-rate-and-udp-throughput.html for example might help (but please keep in mind that it's about perfect conditions and UDP -- in real-world conditions and when using TCP 'environment' and a lot of retransmissions add to a much lower bandwidth).
 
The best I got with el cheapo Wi-Fi (tested with OPi Lite, Banana Pro, Pine64 and NanoPi Air) here in my place was 20 Mbits/sec over a pretty short distance using a good AP configured to use highest power profile. At night! During the day and especially in the evening when loads of other devices around utilize the same radio channels bandwidth drops down to laughable numbers and latency increases like hell.
 
BTW: 20 Mbits/secs means not even 3 MB/s! Just to be sure... I'm always surprised about the huge amount of confusion around Wi-Fi: people thinking there would be something like 'guaranteed bandwidth', hiding SSID would improve security, same with MAC filter... all plain BS but a lot of people believe in

We would all like better WiFi drivers. Unfortunately, all we have right now is what we got from ST-E/Allwinner and it's not very good.
 
52MBit/s is the PHY data rate, not the download speed. I'm getting at most 10MBit/s in testing (less than 1m from AP). The driver in use is xradio and can be built against the kernel sources (e.g. 4.9) so you have WiFi. Get it here: https://github.com/fifteenhex/xradio My modifications to the mainline cw1200 driver are enough to initialize the hardware, but the WiFi chip crashes when you try to scan or join a network.  
Since the cw1200 module in the kernel is almost identical to the driver from the Allwinner SDK, this means even if it worked with the XR819 (which it doesn't) the performance would be just as bad.
 
Honestly not sure why a driver for pre-production silicon with crap performance ever made it into mainline, but whatever...
 
 
We are working to improve the driver, but please realize:
We have no datasheet from Allwinner on how it's supposed to work None of us are paid to do this We all have normal lives with jobs and shit that take up lots of time  
So please be patient, and don't ask us when it will be finished. If you need a board with good WiFi, then that is not the Orange Pi Zero.
 
If you want to help, get Allwinner to release the datasheet so we don't have to guess how this thing works.