Intel Dual Band Wireless 7265 dropping connection

The root cause is described in this blog post It seems that there are some bugs in the Intel iwlwifi driver for 802.11N protocol for the kernel/firmware versions 3.13.0-45-generic/22.24.8.0. The temporary solution it is to disable 802.11N which is an work-around until the issue will be fixed. That means that I will not use the full capacity of the 7265 controller, which will be limited to 54MBs.

sudo sh -c 'echo "options iwlwifi 11n_disable=1" >> /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf'

A lot of Intel wifi cards exhibit this issue until you echo "options iwlwifi 11n_disable=8" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf and reboot

Wheeee! After a couple hours putzing around on the Internet, I found a solution that works for 7260/7265 with even newer firmware for 7265D devices.

Per the official driver page: https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/iwlwifi

7260 and 7265 will not be supported by the newest firmware versions: the last firmware that was released for these devices is -17.ucode. Bug fixes will be ported to -17.ucode. Note that 7265D can run later firmware versions. In order to determine if your 7265 device is a 'D' version, you can check the dmesg output:

Detected Intel(R) Dual Band Wireless AC 7265, REV=0x210 The revision number of a 7265D device is 0x210, if you see any other number, you have a 7265 device.

So, I ran dmesg | grep Wireless and saw I did have device code 0x210.

As such, I was able to use https://github.com/OpenELEC/iwlwifi-firmware/blob/master/firmware/iwlwifi-7265D-21.ucode

Edit: This file is now gone. MAYBE https://github.com/OpenELEC/iwlwifi-firmware/blob/master/firmware/iwlwifi-7265D-22.ucode may work, but I have not tested this.

**If you do not have a 7265D per the dmesg command above, instead use: ** https://github.com/OpenELEC/iwlwifi-firmware/blob/master/firmware/iwlwifi-7265D-17.ucode

Edit: This file is also missing. Either find a new driver that works, or search for old files in git history: https://github.com/OpenELEC/iwlwifi-firmware/commits/master/firmware

Next, I had a look in /lib/firmware, and noticed that I only had the -16.ucode file. So, I went to the git repo, downloaded the file from git, then used: sudo cp ~/Downloads/iwlwifi-726* /lib/firmware restarted my wifi, and actually got a usable connection!

Note that I tried both 11n_disable=8 and 11n_disable=1 (tried each one separately) to no avail. With this updated firmware, I was able to remove these workarounds.