Slow Internet on Ubuntu 20.04 and How to Fix It⌗

After installung Ubuntu 20.04 to a new Dell XPS most things seemed to work. Among other things, however, the internet or maybe rather the connection establishment seemed rather slow. All the streaming services seemed to run fine.

After some fair amount of googling and trying out a few things, the solution below worked in my case.

Apparently there is a feature on Ubuntu called WiFi Powersave that allows to the WiFi device to go on “sleep” after a fixed period of inactivity. After some fixed time the feature checks whether there are any packages to handle. I guess, this allows the OS to save enegery and, therefore, battery.

However, in my case this feature made my internet feel very sluggish.

How to Disable WiFi Powersave⌗

Open or create the file /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf, and set wifi.powersave = 2. Full content in my case:

[connection]
wifi.powersave = 2

The two accepted values are:

  • 2 disabled
  • 3 enabled

Restart the network manager (sudo service network-manager restart) or simply restart the OS.

More information about WiFi Powersave: