Disabling iwlwifi band steering *permanently*

Ask Fedora
1

I just upgraded to an Intel AX210 from an AX200 hoping it would perform a little better and band steering is still broken. Something seems to be overwriting my system-connections file. Currently it looks like this:

[connection]
id=CHUM BUCKET
uuid=772f9998-19be-43b8-bdc9-7f1394fb4b78
type=wifi

[wifi]
band=a
bssid=66:7F:F0:6A:AA:40
mode=infrastructure
ssid=CHUM BUCKET

[wifi-security]
key-mgmt=sae
psk=REDACTED

[ipv4]
method=auto

[ipv6]
addr-gen-mode=stable-privacy
method=auto

A few hours later I come back and the band and bssid paramater are gone from the file. When I go to the KDE Networking - System Settings app, “Band” has reverted to Automatic and I don’t even see the 5G BSSID in the “Restrict to BSSID” pull down/

I don’t have a super strong 5G signal, 54% as opposed to 79% for 2.4 right now. I still get 200+ Mbit/sec at this signal strength. The 2.4 signal is higher, but it’s really slow, less than 20 MBit/sec.

If the driver is somehow dropping the 5G signal, does the nmconnection file get rewritten? How does this happen. It there anything int the networkmanager or iwlwifi configuration that can help me? I tried disabling 802.11n, but speed dropped to 10 Mbit. What I’d really rather do is disable the 2.4G radio entirely provided I could keep bluetooth - can you do that?

Related: I don’t see any evidence that the iwlwifi driver is trying 6GHz band even though the AX210 is allegedly capable. My router is a TPLink BE6500/BE400 which says it’s Wifi 7 but I see no evidence in the web configurator that it’s 6G capable.

2

To clarify, is your connection defaulting to 2.4 Ghz when you have a better 5 Ghz option available?

If so, could you limit your router to 5 Ghz only? Or rename your connections so you only connect to the faster one?

3

You can see from the system-connections file that I am forcing the the interface to 5G and the 5G BSSID of the router. Somehow the config is being overwritten and the conenction is dropping to 2.4.

As I understand it, most implementation can steer a connection up to 5G but not back down to 2.4G.

I can’t disable 2.4G completely, I have various IOT devices that are 2.4 only.

I could use separate SSIDs but I’d have to go and change a bunch of devices. Band steering / shared SSID is only broken on my PC with the AX210 card. It works fine on my other laptops with different hardware (Atheros, Broadcom, etc).

4

Foes the router actually do this? Most routers have dual band enaböed automatically now days. I have that too and I onlybuse that setting on router never using routers 5Ghz channel. Usually router have named channels if not dual band something 2.4 and 5ghz might be worth to check since if you are on setting band from desktop that still doesn’t change router level and it will send signals to machine

5

It’s either a human error or an issue that should be reported.
Try using exclusively these methods to modify and check the connection:

# Modify
sudo nmcli connection modify \
    uuid 772f9998-19be-43b8-bdc9-7f1394fb4b78 \
    802-11-wireless.band a \
    802-11-wireless.bssid 66:7F:F0:6A:AA:40

# Check
sudo nmcli -e no -g 802-11-wireless.band,802-11-wireless.bssid \
    connection show uuid 772f9998-19be-43b8-bdc9-7f1394fb4b78
6

As I understand it, band steering is a client-side heuristic kludge that is vendor dependent. Sometimes, if you are able to set the beacon interval on the router less frequently for 2.4Ghz that can help. All the router does is set the SSID the same on each band. Intel wireless devices seem to be most prone to problems with it, my other computers with Atheros and Broadcom chipsets have no problems.

Band steering is not MLO. MLO is a Wifi 7 feature. Enabling it trashed my throughput even on my iPhone 7, which is the only device I own that is Wifi 7.

7

I’m still investigating. When I enter the BSSID and the Band (“A”) in the KDE System Settings configurator, the system-settings file seems to be stable now. So my claim that the file was getting altered to remove both the BSSID and Band setting was false.

I’m now tring to reproduce the problem when the Band is set only to (“A”) and the BSSID is blank.