XPS13 ubuntu wireless issues.

Hi everybody,

Just wanted to share my experience. I have purchased an XPS 13 recently. Since it had Ubuntu 12.04 I immediately upgraded to 14.04 (by doing a fresh install, no sputnik i think). It was then when i ran into all the wifi problems reported on this thread. The device kept trying to reconnect constantly esp. in battery mode.

I tried the disabling of 802.11 (options iwlwifi 11n_disable=1 into /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf ). That did *not* help at all.

What I had found odd was that usually the connection would be stable for about ten minutes after reboot. Then the adapter would disconnect and try reconnect for several times. Eventually the connection would come back (not every time though) but then be very very slow. So why always about 10mins? It was then when I remembered someone mentioning a potential problem with power management. So does the adapter go to sleep after minutes? I don't know.

So I tried that fix (disabling the power management). And that did help! The wifi is much more stable now. No more disconnects and the speed is as expected. So again, all that I did to fix this issue was to create a file /etc/pm/power.d/wireless and put in the following content:

#!/bin/sh
/sbin/iwconfig wlan0 power off

I really hope that this helps someone.
Sören

P.S.: Btw, here are the details on my adapter (lshw -C network):

 *-network               
       description: Wireless interface
       product: Wireless 7260
       vendor: Intel Corporation
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0
       logical name: wlan0
       version: 6b
       serial: e8:2a:ea:b1:73:80
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless
       configuration: broadcast=yes driver=iwlwifi driverversion=3.13.0-32-generic firmware=22.24.8.0 ip=192.168.1.22 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11abg
       resources: irq:59 memory:f0400000-f0401fff

Thank you Soren!

I also recently purchased the Dell XPS 13 developer edition that came with the Intel 7260 wireless adapter. I noticed straight out of the box that it was having connectivity issues. When I tried using "sudo apt-get update" and "sudo apt-get upgrade" the downloads would slow to crawl and pretty much time out regardless of my distance from the access point. So I cancelled that and tried doing an upgrade to 14.04, which was also timing out during the download phase. I decided to use a USB thumb drive to upgrade the OS to 14.04. However, the problems didn't go away. After upgrading, I noticed the adapter would frequently disconnect from my WLAN (within 5-10 minutes of booting) and would not automatically re-establish the connection. I had to keep restarting the network manager service. Eventually, after reading through several forums, I found your post and tried disabling power management on the wlan0 interface and it seems to have solved all the network issues! No more disconnects, and the apt-get update/install is quick like it should be.

Don't forget to make the /etc/pm/power.d/wireless script executable, so that it runs when the laptop gets rebooted.

sudo chmod +x /etc/pm/power.d/wireless

Thanks again

P.S. There is still an annoying squealing noise that comes from the keyboard when the back light is on, but I'll post about that in a different forum.

Hi bhm777,

nice to hear that disabling the power management helped. I've been working with that fix for quite a while now. Even though it fixed the continuous disconnects, some of the the problems seem to remain. I am running the 3.13.0-36-generic kernel I am still experiencing slow connection to the AP. I have been monitoring the connection (watch iwconfig) for the last couple of days and noticed that at some point (typically after 20min of work) the bit-rate starts jumping from ~72 Mbit/s to 1Mbit/s. And that's regardless of the distance to the AP. The only way to sort of handle this is to disconnect manually and then reconnect.

I still couldn't figure out what might be the cause. I've heard people saying that one should try to switch to 5Ghz, but unfortunately my AP doesn't allow that. So that's still very annoying.

Again, I experienced that disabling the 802.11n (options iwlwifi 11n_disable=1) didn't help at all. I am curious as of other experience that behavior too.

Sören

P.S.: Yeah I get that squeaking noise too, but I have had the old XPS M1330 for many years and got used to these kind of noises i guess ;-)

Wow, I can't believe Dell still ships the XPS with 12.04 LTS. My recommendation would be to upgrade (or reinstall) to Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS 

I received my shiny new Xmas present to myself today (XPS 13 Developer Edition with the 7260 wireless adapter), and I'm also having a beast of a time with the wireless - disconnects after about 3 minutes, then reconnects fairly quickly, and repeats the disconnect/reconnect cycle intermittently. Has anyone tried Soren's solution on the shipped Ubuntu 12.04 install with the 7260 wireless card? I tried it, with a little help from the Ubuntu forums as well, and I've had no luck. I'm wondering now if I might have to update to a newer kernel, since the card appears to be supported in 3.10+.

I can't believe people are still dealing with this issue over ONE YEAR later.

I was considering buying another Developers Edition once I need a new one but the lack of support for such a major annoyance is disheartening.  I'll be looking elsewhere unless Dell gets their act together.

Interesting development - I brought the laptop to work with me today just to do a quick test of an alternate WiFi setup, and it hasn't disconnected on me once. So, upgrading to 14.04 is still on the table, but I'm thinking I need to wrestle with my router at home a little bit first.

Check that your router firmware is up to date. That's the one thing that comes to mind right now.

Oops, I meant to provide the following link that contains some of my notes and a co-workers notes for the XPS 13. We each have different wifi cards which required a different solution.

dev.uabgrid.uab.edu/.../ExperiencesWithSputnik

1. Confirmed wireless connectivity at work and at a friend's house - so far, it's working great everywhere but home. Looks like my home router isn't playing nice with the Intel wireless adapter. (It was working fine with Ubuntu 12.04 on my previous laptop.)

2. Tried to update firmware on router. Xfinity (Comcast) insists that they do regular firmware updates to this model (Arris TC862) themselves, which I can only hope is correct, because their "user friendly" router interface doesn't give me any option to do it myself.

3. Fiddled with 802.11n vs 802.11g settings on router. Had already disabled 802.11n on the Intel adapter via previous troubleshooting instructions, but since the router options were either g,n or b,g,n, this appears to be kind of a moot point.

Current options appear to be:

Ask for a modem/router combo upgrade from Comcast. (Long story, but they owe us at least that much.) Set that up and hope for the best. Not my preferred home networking paradigm, but it wasn't my choice to sign up with them in the first place, so I'm happy to make them do the legwork.

Pick up my own cable modem, use it with the wireless router I have stashed in a box somewhere, and hope for the best.

Update to Ubuntu 14.04 and hope for the best.

Any other suggestions? Any and all ideas welcome.

If you already have another wifi router, you may be able to disable the wifi radio on the modem/wifi device, plug your own wifi access point into a LAN port on the modem (LAN port to LAN port).

Set the access point to access point mode only, i.e. disable it's router functionality, DHCP etc... and let the modem do that.

Configure the WIFI on the access point as necessary.

After some very quick on-my-way-to-bed research on how to do that, it appears this model does not support shutting off the wifi locally and requires a customer service call to Comcast to switch over to bridge mode. But that's not any worse than calling to ask them for a new one (in fact, one user reported success on doing it over chat), so I might give it a shot tomorrow. Thanks.

Whoop! Hope this ends up resolving the issue.

At the risk of cursing myself by posting too soon, I seem to have fixed the problem by switching routers. Moral of the story: when in doubt, blame Comcast. Their favored Arris TC682 modem/router combo doesn't play well with the Intel AC 7260 wireless adapter. (For the record, I can't say for sure that the original tactic noted above didn't help, as that's all still in place, but it wasn't what finally made the difference in my case.)

I had never experienced it before today, having had a screen replacement to deal with another issue (which thankfully has been fixed). I'm guessing the antenna is in the lid? Why is it after changing the lid I am experiencing this for the first time? Bizarre.