Weak Wi-Fi signal on Linux ? Need more power!

With mandatory remote work because of the current crisis, I tried to find a quiet room to work from with my laptop. The Wi-Fi signal isn’t great, but it’s enough to browse the web and work with git.

When my work day was over, I quickly boot back to Pop!_OS and discovered with horror that I could not connect to my wireless network from there. I could see it, but somehow the signal was so weak, it would just not connect at all… Although I had no problem under Windows 10!

Turns out that in Ubuntu (and by extension Pop!_OS), the power management mode of the wireless card is enabled by default and is really aggressive (although I was not on battery or had any kind of power saving mode enabled).

You can check this by entering iwconfig in your Terminal and looking for that last line:

wlo1      IEEE 802.11  ESSID:off/any  
          Mode:Managed  Access Point: Not-Associated   Tx-Power=22 dBm   
          Retry short limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:on

Then to disable it enter sudo iwconfig wlo1 power off (where wlo1 is the actual device id). Note that it will only be effective until you shutdown, reboot or enter sleep mode.

It’s a pity that such a critical option is not surfaced in Gnome Settings for wireless connections! I also think it would make sense to integrate it with System76 Power gnome extension. I would expect this to be enabled only by default when in Battery Life mode.
TLP seems to also be able to manage that for you, so worth having a look at it!