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My laptop seems to be blocking other computers when connected to home DSL/cable routers via WIFI.

The problem is reproduced at several locations with the same laptop: other users complain that they are not able to connect to the WiFi router anymore, and when connected, they experience extremely slow traffic. On my own laptop, everything seems to be fine, apart from occasional disconnections followed by difficult re-connections to the router.

The laptop is an HP Pavilion DM4 with Ubuntu 12.04. The wifi adapter is handled by cfg80211.

This is extremely annoying, and I cannot find any reports of similar problems on the Internet.


By any chance, could my problem be related to this? http://intel.com/support/wireless/wlan/sb/cs-006205.htm

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    I'm experiencing the same problem after upgrading to Ubuntu 13.04. Edit: it seems someone else fixed this, with a diff driver than you have: ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2131244 May 5, 2013 at 23:49
  • Not related to power save polling, as far as I can tell and with the information I have right now. As many home networks use the default 192.168.1.0/24 range, I would ask that you verify that your laptop is not configured to statically use an IP address in that range if other devices were also using the same address the resultant network could experience failures and erratic behavior. Could you boot from a LiveOS CD and tell us if you experience the same effect from a fresh OS?
    – RGS
    Jun 16, 2013 at 13:03
  • "The wifi adapter is handled by cfg80211": it is likely that there is another driver running on top of cfg80211 that is your real driver. If you run lsmod, then follow the "Used by" column on the right against cfg80211 to identify the real driver. Jun 20, 2013 at 14:41

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It is likely that this is caused by a hardware fault or a driver problem. Try isolating the issue by acquiring or borrowing a USB wifi adaptor, and see if the problem goes away when you switch to using the external wifi.

If this fixes the problem, then you have a driver issue, and should file a bug. There are instructions on the steps to follow before filing a bug here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LinuxWireless

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