Wi-Fi stopping and only reboot helps - my radical solution

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lord_prokrastinator
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Wi-Fi stopping and only reboot helps - my radical solution

Post by lord_prokrastinator »

Hi All, I am writing this long post to help other linuxmint users which are looking for the solution of this annoying problem. At first, I am apologizing for my bad English, it is not my mother tongue. So, the issue is following. Wi-Fi connection stopped suddenly from time to time. After WiFi stopped, only reboot can help to renew the internet connection via WiFi. This stopping can happen after 10 min of working, or after 10 hours of stable connection. Such an unpredictable behavior is very annoying. The sign of WiFi stopping is 0% power in widget (see picture).
Image

There are a lot of topics on this and other forums where people give advises for solving this problem. The things I tried:
Just after stopping WiFi:
- to reconnect
- choosing another WiFi network
- switch OFF and then ON WiFi at all
- restart NetworkManager

All these things do not help. Only reboot is needed.

In order to avoid stopping I tried:

- turn OFF bluetooth

- check the "Power Save" flag, it should be OFF. ( File /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf , here wifi.powersave = 2 ). I made experiment, and set this value to 0, Power Save ON, and WiFi stopping appeared very quickly, after some minutes after booting. But the problem remains even when this flag is OFF. So, this is not a solution.

- I installed wondershaper and tried to reduce the WiFi speed to ~50 Mbps. I don't have enough statistics, but seems to be this does not help. Why I tried this? - read the following text.

Then I tried to understand, which situation provoke WiFi stopping? And here is my observations which I hope can be helpful for Linux developers and people who suffer from this problem.

I notice that this problem appeared only in places where optical cable connected to the router from the provider. This router looks like this (see picture):
Image

In the settings of one of such routers I used, there was an option like "Wireless Multimedia Extensions(WMM, WME)" ON/OFF. When I switched this WMM in the router to "OFF" my WiFi connection became stable!

In other router which I use now, this option is absent, and WiFi stopping appears.

I noticed, that often WiFi stopping happens when laptop starts to send/receive big amount of data. For example, while using speedtest site (see picture) especially when 5 GHz WiFi connection is used.
Image

It looks like WiFI connection "chokes" when a lot of data need to be transmitted.

So, the only way to have a stable WiFi connection without sudden stopping is buying another additional router, which I did. I bought a cheap TP-Link WiFi router and connected it to the main router as Access point via cable (LAN port to LAN port). And I connect my laptop with LinuxMint to this new router.
Image

Result: the speed is not so fast as was when I use the main router, but there was no stopping all the time I used this scheme.

Unfortunately, such kind of problems are very hard to fix by developers. They have to have the same configuration of equipment to reproduce the bug. May be, people who write network manager don't have such a problem routers and they even don't know about this problem.
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 2 times in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
lord_prokrastinator
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Joined: Thu Nov 25, 2021 10:31 pm

Re: Wi-Fi stopping and only reboot helps - my radical solution

Post by lord_prokrastinator »

I just would like to update the topic by the following news.
It seems that newest kernel 5.17 provides much more stable work of wi-fi and bluetooth of my RTL8822CE card. Hours and even days of proper working. I don't know, maybe it is just a coincidence and really nothing was improved in 5.17, but I tried 5.16 before this and the problem was present in 5.16.
prrawlins
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Re: Wi-Fi stopping and only reboot helps - my radical solution

Post by prrawlins »

i was going to suggest an internet usb dongle...it sounds like hardware problem with the old kernel...which is fixed with the new kernel...cool
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