Intel Wireless Issues – Fix for Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 on Ubuntu 18.04

18.04intel-wirelessnetworking

I have a laptop with with the Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 and am running Ubuntu 18.04 (although the problem existed with 17.10 and I presume this is a general problem). At home the Wifi works well, however, on some networks it will intermittently disconnect. Using Gnome network manager and turning the Wi-fi off and back on could fix the issue, but not always. This could happen numerous times a day.

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After much research and reading the Kernel documentation on this, I found that making all the following changes work.

Change the wi-fi country code (thanks to this post). As root edit /etc/default/crda and set the following to your country code:

REGDOMAIN={ISO COUNTRY CODE}

Disable Bluetooth, although this is a dual-band adapter, it's not good at handling Bluetooth and wi-fi at the same time. From the Kernel documentation:

For users of these devices who have problems when Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are running concurrently, we suggest to disable BT Coex by loading iwlwifi with bt_coex_active=0 as a module parameter.

Also from the Kernel documentation also discusses that the device does not handle 2.4 Ghz noise very well and recommends the following:

- Disable Wi-Fi's power save (prevent the PCIe link to go to power save): power_save=0 module parameter for iwlmvm
- Disable USB3 in BIOS (if possible), it not, just stop using it
- Disable 40MHz on 2.4GHz: cfg80211_disable_40mhz_24ghz module parameter
- Use 5GHz band (on devices that support 5GHz operation)

In a nutshell, I did not disable USB3 in BIOS. But did the others, to implement these changes add the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf:

options iwlwifi bt_coex_active=0 swcrypto=1 11n_disable=8

UPDATE: Thanks to @chili555, the Kernel driver page appears to be out-dated/incorrect, the power_scheme value does not exists and appears that we should use power_save=0. Documentation updated.

A good resource for debugging the iwlwifi driver is https://support.system76.com/articles/wireless/

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Ubuntu – Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 keeps dropping wifi

This is what support told me to do to fix it, it worked somewhat until a new kernel came out. It looks like every time a new kernel is installed in linux the 5ghz band becomes unstable and gets dropped after a couple seconds or minutes

Support Case: My wifi on my laptop keeps dropping the 5ghz network. Product Model: gazp9

When I see the World regulatory domain updated, I'm led to believe that you are lacking a recent firmware update that should help with some of the issues with the card. There are actually two parts to the update. One was a kernel, and the other was firmware in the OS and should be coming in with your regular updates.

if you're unsure about things, you can certainly open a terminal and perform the following commands

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

When done, fully reboot your system.

I also had to change my World regulatory domain to the US see below:

rt@simon:/tmp$ iw reg get
country 00:
    (2402 - 2472 @ 40), (3, 20)
    (2457 - 2482 @ 40), (3, 20), PASSIVE-SCAN, NO-IBSS
    (2474 - 2494 @ 20), (3, 20), NO-OFDM, PASSIVE-SCAN, NO-IBSS
    (5170 - 5250 @ 40), (3, 20), PASSIVE-SCAN, NO-IBSS
    (5735 - 5835 @ 40), (3, 20), PASSIVE-SCAN, NO-IBSS


rt@simon:/tmp$ sudo iw reg set US
[sudo] password for rt: 
rt@simon:/tmp$ iw reg get
country US:
    (2402 - 2472 @ 40), (3, 27)
    (5170 - 5250 @ 40), (3, 17)
    (5250 - 5330 @ 40), (3, 20), DFS
    (5490 - 5600 @ 40), (3, 20), DFS
    (5650 - 5710 @ 40), (3, 20), DFS
    (5735 - 5835 @ 40), (3, 30)
    (57240 - 63720 @ 2160), (N/A, 40)
rt@simon:/tmp$

Ubuntu – Intel Dual Band Wireless 7265 dropping connection

The root cause is described in this blog post It seems that there are some bugs in the Intel iwlwifi driver for 802.11N protocol for the kernel/firmware versions 3.13.0-45-generic/22.24.8.0. The temporary solution it is to disable 802.11N which is an work-around until the issue will be fixed. That means that I will not use the full capacity of the 7265 controller, which will be limited to 54MBs.

sudo sh -c 'echo "options iwlwifi 11n_disable=1" >> /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf'

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Ubuntu – Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 keeps dropping wifi

Ubuntu – Intel Dual Band Wireless 7265 dropping connection

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