Ubuntu driver for WiFi for Asus 550L

My Asus 550L, which initially came with Windows 7 and now has Ubuntu 20.04, connects to Internet via Wi-Fi. The connection works for a short time and is unstable.

Do you have any suggestion or can you tell me how to change drivers (Ralink corp. RT3290 Wireless 802.11n 1T/1R PCIe [1814:3290])?


Your legacy Medaiatek RT3290 device is a WiFi+Bluetooth adapter, so there is a possible interference between the two.

There seem to be a few alternatives.

  1. There are sometimes configuration options that help, like changing the WiFi channel or device antenna. You can check if there is something like that.

  2. From this similar post you can try

     sudo sed -i 's/wifi.powersave = 3/wifi.powersave = 2/' /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf
     systemctl restart network-manager.service
    

    which changes the configuration for powersave in /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf. It is also reported that changing the value to 0 instead of 2 might work. You may perhaps need also

     sudo iwconfig wlo1 power off
    

    (use the name of your adapter instead of wlo1, you can check with iw dev).

  3. This old thread also advocates disabling power management with

     sudo iwconfig wlo1 power off
     sudo iwconfig wlo1 txpower fixed
    
  4. This old Q&A describes a method

     sudo apt install firmware-misc-nonfree
    

    that works for Debian 9, which is backed by a recent report that it works in Ubuntu 20.04. But this mentions that the problem is with kernels >=4, and they were not solved yet. At east, it is not difficult to try it.

  5. This old answer shows how to compile from source, and it seems it worked for many people, but it deals with old kernels, so it is not clear it would work for you. This one is harder to try than the one above.