Our wifi at work was slow (~16 Mbit/s), so I ordered us a new modem. Lo and behold, our speed went almost up to 120…on my colleagues computer. I was still stuck at 16. What gives?
I instantly thought “firmware”, but I really wasn’t sure what could be wrong. dmesg | grep firmware revealed this:
[ 3.087847] platform regulatory.0: Direct firmware load for regulatory.db failed with error -2
That seems wrong. A quick search of the Arch Wiki revealed that I had the wrong regulatory domain set. I followed the instructions on the wiki to set my regdomain as US.
$ yay crda
$ reboot # and log back in
$ dmesg | grep cfg80211
I don’t precisely know what the output of that dmesg is supposed to be, but I got:
[ 2.110639] cfg80211: Loading compiled-in X.509 certificates for regulatory database
[ 2.135368] cfg80211: Loaded X.509 cert 'sforshee: 00b28ddf47aef9cea7'
I continued with the wiki: ~~~~ $ iw reg set US $ iw reg get # to check that country is set to “US”
This helped, my download speed went up to about 20 Mbit/s. But this is still nowhere near 120! Something else was wrong.
I googled around a little more, and found a suggestion on the Wiki (the answer is always the wiki!).
If you have problems connecting to networks in general or your link quality is very poor, try to disable 802.11n, and perhaps also enable software encryption:
/etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.confoptions iwlwifi 11n_disable=1 swcrypto=1If you have a problem with slow uplink speed in 802.11n mode, for example 20Mbps, try to enable antenna aggregation:
/etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.confoptions iwlwifi 11n_disable=8
So I set my /etc/modprobe/d/iwlwifi.conf to be:
options iwlwifi 11n_disable=8 swcrypto=1 lin_disable=8
Bam! 114 Mbit/s. There we go!