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This card had been working flawlessly for several years on Ubuntu 12.04, 14.04, and recently 16.04 but after a recent update it started dropping connection for no apparent reason. Distance from router is about 20 feet through a couple of walls and nothing environmentally has changed. I ran the wireless script from @chili555 answer here.

this is the resulting pastebin report.

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Elder Geek
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I resolved this problem by turning off power management on my card by editing the wifi power management configuration with the command sudo gedit /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf

The file contained 2 lines:

[connection]
wifi.powersave = 3

I thought this was surprising as I knew I had disabled power management back in the 12.04 days until I realized I had done a fresh install of 16.04 rather than an upgrade on this particular system when I went from 14.04 to 16.04

I changed it to:

[connection]
wifi.powersave = 0

After a reboot I had no further problems. Wifi stayed connected reliably.

Elder Geek
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  • Only issue with this solution is that every Network Manager update will prompt if you want to keep your settings in this file. I think we would be better off if a bug report is filed complaining about this change – Jeremy31 Oct 12 '16 at 23:13
  • @Jeremy31 I don't mind saying no to the prompt (as long as I get it). Why do you consider this to be a bug? My memory of disabling power management back in 12.04 may be faulty but if I'm right it wasn't a change, but something that has been this way AFAIK. Can you verify that it changed? I assume this is something they did to save power on laptops (which doesn't concern me on this desktop) but it may have value as configured for those in a more portable condition. ;-) – Elder Geek Oct 12 '16 at 23:20
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    The change was to only enable power management when on battery power see bug report and this doesn't appear to be true – Jeremy31 Oct 12 '16 at 23:31
  • @Jeremy31 Thank you. It appears that bug has been effectively squashed. – Elder Geek Nov 10 '16 at 22:55
  • After seeing some source code it might be better to have wifi.powersave = 2 as that is what I needed to do on one laptop as that really disables powersave from being enabled – Jeremy31 Nov 10 '16 at 23:02
  • @Jeremy31 All solutions are situation dependent IMHO. :-) – Elder Geek Nov 10 '16 at 23:03