Choppy WiFi Intel card

Fedora 32 GNOME, newest kernel 5.7.11, Intel Wireless 8265 Adapter. Laptop is Dell Latitude 5490.

I’ve been getting very choppy WiFi connection over the past few weeks. It’s not gone completely but the bar keeps going up and down, which shows very clearly on sites that have listener on network connection like Facebook or Bitbucket (keeps getting toast notifications that connection is lost then recovered then repeat). Zoom calls are terrible too.

WiFi firmware package installed is iwl7260-firmware which seems to put all the right ucode files in both /lib/firmware and /usr/lib/firmware . Nothing suspicious in dmesg or journalctl . I know it’s not my network because other devices (Android, iPad, Windows) work fine. I even tried swapping out the WiFi card to an Intel AX200 which uses the same firmware package and same result. I also tried booting an ElementaryOS live USB and it seems okay, though not as good as other devices but not as bad as my main Fedora system either.

I’m really baffled by this and the thought of switching back to Windows, or even switching to a different distro, pains me. I love my system as it is, just need to get the damn WiFi fixed.

Anyone has any idea on how to troubleshoot/fix this?

2 Likes

I have similar issues.
My phones and another laptop work fine, but the Wi-Fi connection is unstable on this one:

$ lspci | grep -i -e net | while read -r DEV_ID SKIP; do lspci -k -n -n -s ${DEV_ID}; done
02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Wireless 8265 / 8275 [8086:24fd] (rev 78)
	Subsystem: Intel Corporation Dual Band Wireless-AC 8265 [8086:1010]
	Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi
	Kernel modules: iwlwifi

$ rpm -q iwl7260-firmware kernel
iwl7260-firmware-25.30.13.0-110.fc32.noarch
kernel-5.7.11-200.fc32.x86_64

In my case, Wi-Fi network search takes a long time and it may also fail, especially when reconnecting, in addition it disconnects a couple of times a day.
Rebooting the router somewhat helps, but it doesn’t affect other devices, so I’m confused.

I also use an Intel 8265 in my notebook, and it has a consistent connection. I would suggest that you open your PC and check the antennae. There should be two of them, and they should be well connected to the card. You can even order a new set of antennae that may be better.

If you need to add a second antenna, do not route it through the case the same way as the first one. Different orientation of the two is what helps signal reception.

(When talking about computer stuff, do you say “antennae” or “antennas”?)

1 Like

I’m also seeing intermittent wifi issues using a Intel Corporation Wireless 8265 / 8275 (rev 78) built in radio on a Dell Latitude. Frequently I’ll see the network manager wifi indicator drop to nothing and I’ll lose connection. If I cat /proc/net/wireless, the values almost always read the same both during these loss/drop events and normal. Something strange though: I was under the impression that the noise dB was on a scale of 1 - -120: I seem to have a value out of range.

❯ cat /proc/net/wireless

Inter-| sta-|   Quality        |   Discarded packets               | Missed | WE
 face | tus | link level noise |  nwid  crypt   frag  retry   misc | beacon | 22
wlp2s0: 0000   46.  -64.  -256        0      0      0      0     16        0
❯ rpm -q iwl7260-firmware kernel
iwl7260-firmware-25.30.13.0-110.fc32.noarch
kernel-5.7.9-200.fc32.x86_64
kernel-5.7.10-201.fc32.x86_64
kernel-5.7.11-200.fc32.x86_64
1 Like