Some tips to improve your internet connection in Ubuntu 18.04

Vineet Kumar
3 min readApr 8, 2023

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These are only a few recommended settings with which they can help you improve your connection.

I should also mention that, if any of these settings did not work for you or causes a conflict, simply revert the changes and return to the configuration you had.

So that you must be careful with the changes you make and that you save those initial settings and values ​​in a text file before making the changes.

  1. Disable 802.11n
  2. Disable power management
  3. Use the correct drivers

1. Disable 802.11n

Although is an 802.11n WiFi protocol that offers more functions and higher data transmission speed, some routers just don’t support it, which causes slowness on the internet.

In addition to the, router, the iwlwifi driver developed by Intel and commonly installed on Linux machines, can also conflict with 802.11n. So the best they can do is turn off the default.

First we must carry out the identification of it, so in a terminal we must execute:

sudo lshw -C network

The command will display information about the network and the driver that works, so they should receive on the screen a line where we will identify the name of the driver:

configuration: broadcast = yes driver = iwlwifi driverversion …

Once the driver has been identified, it is time to deactivate 802.11n. To do this, use the following command to obtain root privileges

sudo su

Now just use the following command when replacing DRIVER with the name of the driver identified on the screen that appeared to you:

echo "options DRIVER 11n_disable=1?" >> /etc/modprobe.d/DRIVER.conf

Once this is done, we proceed to restart the system and verify if the change benefited us, in case it is not enough to delete the file that we created with:

sudo rm -rf /etc/modprobe.d/DRIVER.conf

And we restart the computer again.

2. Disable power management

The power management function may be to reduce the performance of the network card. Some are programmed to control power management, which is a way to improve performance is managed by the network card.

To disable network card power management, you need to know the logical name of the network device. This is usually Eth0 or wlp1s0.

But you can verify it by typing in the terminal in case your connection is via cable:

sudo ifconfig

Or if it is through Wifi:

sudo iwconfig

Now the command to disable the administration is the following, taking into account that in my case it is wlp1s0:

iwconfig wlp1s0 power off

This change is not permanent, so when you restart the computer, the power management will come back into operation and you will have to do it again.So add it in crontab file

contab -e
Add Following in the bottom of the file
@restart iwconfig wlp1s0 power off

3. Use the correct drivers:

One of the connection problems it may be related to the Wi-Fi adapter, is that the driver you are using is generic, since many times the manufacturers do not usually release the code for Linux or it is simply outdated.

That is why We must perform an update or installation of the correct and most current driver. For this we must know our chipset. Just type in terminal:

lspci | grep -i wireless

Since this is a fairly open topic, you can have two possibilities, that from “Software and updates” in the “additional drivers” tab, the same system offers you the installation of private drivers.

Or in another case, you will have to search the network for the driver and install it manually, since most of these you must compile.

Good Luck

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