If you are experiencing slow wireless transfers, then the following guide may help.
The wireless cards used in our machines are Intel AX200 or AX201 that have advanced features to help reduce power consumption. Some wireless N networks can result in poor performance. The following steps can help identify and resolve this.
If you are seeing the wireless report as a "Wireless-AC 9462", fear not, as this is how some of the Linux kernels identifies the AX201 wireless card. There are a couple of things we can try to get this going as the wireless card will limit the amount of power it consumes and by default, runs in power save mode. We can run a command to temporarily turn this off to determine if there are any improvements. To do this, please open Terminal and run the following command:
LabTop Mk IV:
sudo iwconfig wlp0s20f3 power off
StarLite Mk IV:
sudo iwconfig wlp0s12f0 power off
For Manjaro (Arch-based) installs:
sudo pacman -S wireless_tools
You can check the connection with a couple of useful tools such as "wavemon" which is what we recommend using. To install this for Debian installs, again within Terminal just type the following command:
For Debian-based installs:
sudo apt install wavemon
For Arch-based installs:
sudo pacman -S wavemon
For Fedora-based installs:
sudo dnf install wavemon
You can then monitor the connection status live by typing the following terminal command:
wavemon
To scan all visible wireless networks in range, this command will bring up the SSID's along with the rate and signal statistics:
nmcli device wifi list
The following command will monitor the status of the connection you are currently connected to and we can determine whether there are any anomalies present:
watch -n1 iwconfig
Going forward, to improve and turn off power saving between reboots, you can run the following commands and then reboot to apply the changes.
Enable Link Aggregation and disable wireless power saving:
sudo touch /etc/modprobe.d/starlabs.conf
echo "options iwlwifi 11n_disable=8 power_save=off" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/starlabs.conf
sudo update-grub
Reboot for the settings to take effect.
Advanced Settings: (There may be Dragons here)
You can adjust the configuration file /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf more to see if other changes make any difference. Removing the option 11n_disable=8to read:
options iwlwifi power_save=off
Then reboot for this to apply.
Also, you can make a separate configuration file if you prefer such as:
touch /etc/modprobe.d/starlabs.conf
echo "options iwlwifi 11n_disable=8 power_save=off" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/starlabs.conf
sudo update-grub
And then if you wish to revert the settings back to defaults:
sudo rm /etc/modprobe.d/starlabs.conf
Further adjustments can be made from the following list:
1. options iwlwifi bt_coex_active=0
2. options iwlwifi bt_coex_active=1
3. options iwlwifi 11n_disable=8
4. options iwlwifi swcrypto=1
5. options iwlwifi power_save=off
6. options iwlwifi d0i3_disable=1
7. options iwlwifi uapsd_disable=1
1st option: Disables Bluetooth compatibility
2nd option: Enables Bluetooth compatibility
3rd option Enables antenna aggregation
4th option - Adds Software Encryption
5th option - Disables adapters power saving
6th option - Disables LAR functionality
7th option - This may cause interoperability problems with some APs, manifesting in lower-than-expected throughput due to those APs not enabling aggregation