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Posted on 2022-02-03
A few weeks ago, the network speeds at my home got upgraded. I wanted to check out the new network speeds, but noticed something interesting. While my mobile phone reached around 50-60 Mbps, making some use of the improved speeds, my laptop is stuck at 30 Mbps. And my PinePhone is also stuck at pretty much the same speed.
I found this to be very weird, so I searched the internet for solutions. Most of them require installing new drivers, but as I was using ArcoLinux, I probably already have the newest drivers. After a few more websites I finally found the solution: Power Management was on by default on the network card.
Turning power management off increased the speed of the wireless LAN up to 50-80 Mbps, a very big improvement.
The steps are really simple, I would recommend everyone to just try it out.
iwconfig
Check your configuration of the network cards. Look for something like "Power Management:on". If you found it, note the name of the card, mine is "wlp60s0". Now just run (substituting <card-name> with your network card name):
sudo iwconfig <card-name> power off
Now check your network speeds again to check if the speeds are really faster. This change will survive during a reboot, so there is also a possibility to edit a configuration file to turn power management off permanently. As my network speeds are mostly big enough, I will likely just turn off power management when needed (e.g. updating the OS, downloading large files, ...). You can find out more information in the following blog post if you are interested:
https://www.askwoody.com/forums/topic/fixing-slow-wifi-in-linux-intel-wifi/
I was sure many people did not know their network speeds are slower than they could be. Maybe this will help at least one other person out their. I agree that there would be better places for such information, but as my Gemini presence is currently just the blog/gemlog, I posted it on here. I may expand my Gemini site in the future.