Ubuntu – Intermittent wifi on Dell Inspiron 15 3565 with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

16.04dellinspironwireless

I got my new Dell Inspiron 15 3565 preloaded with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

I'm first time user of Ubuntu. All working fine except the WiFi. It doesn't respond after 10 minutes. If I reboot the laptop it is back to action again, but for the next 10 minutes.

Can someone help me to find the problem and solve it?

Here is the result of lspci -knn | grep Net -A3; rfkill list:

$ lspci -knn | grep Net -A3; rfkill list
16:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Wireless 3165 [8086:3165] (rev 79)
    Subsystem: Intel Corporation Wireless 3165 [8086:4410]
    Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi
    Kernel modules: iwlwifi
0: hci0: Bluetooth
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no
1: phy0: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no

Output of wireless info script

Here is the result of the Network Diagnostics when the wifi had stopped working:

--2017-09-26 12:24:29--  https://github.com/UbuntuForums/wireless-info/raw/master/wireless-info
Resolving github.com (github.com)... failed: Connection timed out.
wget: unable to resolve host address ‘github.com’

Best Answer

Sorry for the very late answer, but just in case someone else was having the same issue, using tlp is the answer. I have just recently installed Ubuntu 18.04, onto a Dell Inspiron 15 3565 and had very similar wifi issues. The laptop was also having additional power issues such as the screen intermittently turning off. After installing and slightly altering the tlp config file, the computer now runs very smoothly on battery power.

The issue was fixed using these few steps:

  1. Installing the tlp power manager.

    To install tlp:

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linrunner/tlp
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install tlp tlp-rdw 
    
  2. Unfortunately the default battery setting using tlp didn't fix the issue, though after changing some settings in the config file, the issues were fixed.

    To open the config file:

    sudo nano /etc/tlp.d/*.conf
    
  3. Within the config file, changing the ON_BAT settings to be the same as ON_AC has made all the difference. Changing these settings has stopped the wifi disconnections as well as the other power issues the Dell was suffering from.

    These are the changes:

    CPU_HWP_ON_BAT=balance_performance
    SCHED_POWERSAVE_ON_BAT=0
    ENERGY_PERF_POLICY_ON_BAT=performance
    WIFI_PWR_ON_BAT=off
    

After altering the battery settings to be more like AC, I was expecting a considerably shorter battery life. This hasn't been the case :)

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