Intel® Wireless-N 7260 - slows

[SGowr]

Hi,

I have a problem with Intel Wireless-N 7260. The card works just fine, but after a few minutes transfer slows down to about 4Mb/s (802.11n -> 802.11b?).

I tried with all drivers and always have the same problem (now I have ,16.6.0.8). Sometimes the card loses connection and I must reset it.

Windows 7 64bit Professional on Lenovo Z510

Sorry for my english.

[HL4]

Hi Joe,

I own a Dell XPS 15 9530, and it has been having this issue since day 1. I tried everything... Including replacing the wifi card with a new one Dell provided, re-installing the system multiple times, different networks, different cities... I am quite certain it's the card. Here's my answers, as much as I can.

1. 2.4 GHz.

2. Win 8.1.

3. Everywhere. Yes.

4. About 2~5 depending on test site.

5. It's most obvious during gaming, VERY frustrating. Otherwise it still happens (if you ping -t, you'll see spikes).

6. Not tested for disabling BT.

7. Dell.

8. Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260

[JAher1]

Hello I also have the dodgy network card

1.2.4GHz

2. Win 8.1

3. At home across the board very regular and often just cuts off still shown as connected but nothing works, connected to a standard Virgin router nothing fancy about it. At work less frequent despite being connected to the server and working heavily over the network connected to a Draytek 2860n router.

4. Quite a few however at home I have switched to channel 13 were nobody operates for some reason so have it all to myself as well as having nothing in 10, 11, 12 or 14 and at work IT have spent quite some time optimizing the channels and so on

5. Across the board from what I can tell no specific action causes it to occur

6.Disabling uAPSD has helped in my opinion havn't done a scientific test but it feels less frequent since the change especially at work. Switching off bluetooth is no help plugging out mouse and keyboard 2.4G dongles does not help. I don't know what VHT is??

7. Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro

8. Yes, this unit is only 2 months old and has not been modified in any way

Would really like if there was a patch or update to fix this as I do not want to have to send it back and be without it for many weeks,

Appreciate your help

[Jose_H_Intel1]

johnahern85, I do not know where you are located but there are some restrictions to use channels 12-14 in some countries; that is probably the reason for such low activity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels

HT or VHT mode is available in the Advanced tab of the wireless adapter properties (Device Manager).

[JEast3]

I have a Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus with the N 7260 card and my wireless is basically unusable due to the sporadic wifi connection.

My ping times to my router over wifi go something like this: 1ms, 1ms, 65ms, 85ms, 105ms, 1ms, 1ms, 2ms, 38ms, 99ms...

I have tried every Intel driver update that has come out, with no improvement. I also went though the steps to roll all the way back to the Windows drivers (no improvement) and then the latest Intel drivers (17.0.5.8)

Answers to above:

1. Both 2.4 and 5

2. Win 8.1 x64

3. Happens on ALL wireless networks: home, work, public wifi hotspots

4. 2-3 AP in range

5. The sporadic ping times are always an issue. It only takes a few seconds of running a ping to see them jump from 1ms to >100ms.

6. Tried disabling Bluetooth, uAPSD, VHT. No effect

7. Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus, i7

8. OEM installed

[ACriv]

Hi Joe,

I own a Sony Vaio Multi Fit, and it has been having this issue since day 1; fortunately Sony provided me with a little usb wireless micro adapter (Belkin SURF N300)and so I am able to see the huge difference in terms stabilty and strenght of the connection in every condition (infact the Sony help-desk told me that this is an already recognized issue and Sony/Intel are working on it)

Here are my answers:

1. 2.4 GHz (my router works only on 2.4 GHz band, it is a Netgear DGN2200 updated to the latest firmaware)

2. Win 8.1 Pro 64 bit

3. I use it only at home

4. About 6.

5. I don'play online so my experience is just slowdowns in loading pages, high buffering times for video streaming and, of course, frequent connections drops (as i mentioned before this doesn't happen with other pcs or even inserting the Belkin little usb wireless micro adapter...............)

6. Tried disabling Bluetooth, uAPSD, VHT. No effect.

7. Sony Vaio SVF13N2Y9EB.

8. Yes, this unit is only 2 months old and has not been modified in any way

[PMans]

1. Does the issue occur in 2.4 or 5 GHz?

5GHz (home) and 2.4GHz (work), just 802.11a/n or 802.11b/g/n

1. What is your operating system?

windows 7 64 bit, linux x64... both used at work and home

1. Where is the issue happening? Is it happening only at home or across different networks?

work and home;

1. How many APs or wireless networks are broadcasting in your area?

at home, just one. at work quite a few

1. Does the issue occur when doing some specific actions, such as copying files, streaming, or gaming?

seems to be as much time related as traffic volumes; with linux it can be quite a few hours before connection stops passing traffic.

1. Is the issue affected by disabling Bluetooth*, uAPSD, or VHT?

happens when I am not using bluetooth (can be disabled).

1. What is the brand of your system?

dell E7440 or Lenovo T540p

1. Was the Intel® wireless adapter installed by the system manufacturer?

yes for both laptops.

[GBals]

Okay, I sent my laptop into Acer under warranty repairs. They claimed to have fixed this issue by re-flashing the BIOS. I haven't received the laptop back yet, but I'll write a report once I've tested it. Maybe you all can try this in the meantime.

Gunnar

[n500]

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga S240 factory equipped with this wireless adapter. OS is Win 8.1 (x64). My router is from TP-Link, Model 1043nd with 802.11n. I've encountered ping delays up to 90ms from the notebook to the router. Transmission speeds were way below expectation, when copying files my max. transmit speed was around 3MB/s (~24Mbps). Replacing the adapter is quite a task, Lenovo has a whitelist with allowed adapters in the BIOS, so a simple replacement like others have done sucessfully was out of question.

I've tried different driver versions but final resolution was achieved by uninstalling all previous drivers (hit uninstall in device manager and select remove driver software) until the Microsoft driver like in the picture above (16.0.0.62) appeared in device manager. As soon as you connect to the internet with this driver, Windows going to update automatically to an old version of the Intel driver. Then I've installed 17.0.5 and turned off U-APSD. And tadaaa, it works!

I have now 22MB/s for file transfers and speedtest.net states the full 125Mbps of my internet connection.

Pings are back to 1-3ms.

[JSaud]

I'd be curious to see how this fairs in terms of sustaining a connection as hours/days pass. I can deal with minor ping spikes but not full disconnects like before. Of course if this is fixed I expect this to filter over to Linux in a timely fashion, but the lack of fix over the last... year... despite continual updates claiming a fix has been issued on any operating system has me wildly skeptical.

Also, what you just explained with the frustrations you have with Lenovo (HP likes to do this too) whitelisting which wireless cards can and can't be used is the exact reason why I refuse to buy products with laughable restrictions like that any longer. These companies that do this need to get a clue.

[MAdam8]

Hello - I found this thread when researching problems I've been having with my new laptop. Like the rest of you, I have an Intel N-7260 wireless adapter inside of my laptop which randomly and repeatedly drops my wireless connection, sometimes to "Limited" status and other times completely losing the ability to see any and all wireless networks. I joined the forum to chime in, after having wasted nearly three hours with Sony's phone and chat support whose staff could tell me nothing about what was going on inside my computer and who claimed to know nothing about the problems with the 7260.

1. Issue happens in 2.4 GHz
2. Running Windows 8.1. 7260 driver version is 16.6.0.8.
3. Happens at home. My computer operates approximately 25 feet from the router. There are four other wireless devices in the same room. No other device experiences network issues.
4. At least eight other wireless networks are broadcasting in my area. Unknown how many are AC.
5. The issue occurs as often as every ten minutes, usually while actively surfing the web. All of a sudden, the next link or refresh that I click tells me the page cannot be found.
6. The issue is not affected by disabling Bluetooth*, uAPSD, or VHT. All have been tried, to no success.
7. Sony Vaio Flip, model SVF15N26CXB.
8. The Intel® wireless adapter was part of the OEM device. I purchased the system new, about three weeks ago.

An earlier post mentioned that user owning a Sony Vaio with a Logitech wireless mouse, and the USB was plugged into a port at the lower right corner, near the Intel 7260's placement. I don't lknow where the Intel 7260 is at inside my laptop, but I also use a Logitech wireless mouse, and my USB is plugged into the USB2.0 jack on the lower left side.

[PRoem]

Hi guys,

I have an Acer Aspire S7 392 and have experienced WiFi connection problems since the moment I took the device out of the box. First there was the frequent disconnecting from my router, then there was the incredibly slooooow connection speed. After reading through this entire forum I have tried several things.

With the drivers in between 16.536 and 17.05 I had horrible, horrible connection speeds. Sometimes my download wouldn't even go above 2 Mbps while standing directly next to the router. Given this frustration I have let my actual work slide and decided to find out what is actually helping me. (The clueless Acer customer service told me the problem was probably with my "wifi antennas" and I should send it in to repair.)

What works best for me for now is actually to revert back to the Driver Version 16.536 where I get the highest speeds.

I have uninstalled my drivers to version 16.02 (or something like that). Then I restart my computer and the drivers automatically update to 16.536.

I get the following test results:

Driver 16.536 with HT modus on (Best)

Driver 16.536 with HT modus off

Then I upgraded to the new driver version in hopes of actually getting better speeds. But no.

Driver 17.05 HT Modus On UASP on

Turning off UASP helps, but not as much as the old drivers

Driver 17.05 HT Modus On UASP off

And just for completeness sake

Driver 17.05 HT Modus Off UASP off

I will keep testing and see if the connection drops keep occuring in this old driver version or if bluetooth is in any way affected. Regarding the Wifi speed there seems to be some clear fuck-up between the 16.536 version and versions afterwards. I haven't moved the computer and just the different driver makes tremendous differences in speed. I spent 5h on this now. Please intel, you should be able to solve this. Buy some computers with the known issues and do some testing...

[FYuso]

Hi Joe

1. Does the issue occur in 2.4 or 5 GHz? Occur in both but worst on 2.4 GHz. I am using driver 17.1.0.19 (21Jul2014). I think is is related to N also as my router supports abgn only.
2. What is your operating system? Win 8.1 Pro 64 Bit (to the latest update as of 27 Sep 2014)
3. Where is the issue happening? Is it happening only at home or across different networks? It is happening at home. I'm using Asus RT-N66 dual band router. My Internet is 10 Mbps. In 2.4 GHz (n), I could only get 0.2-0.5 Mbps while in 5 Ghz (n), I could get 5 Mbps-8 Mbps. I tried using my HP notebook with Ralink MiniPCI wifi n, it could get 11 Mbps using 2,4 Ghz (n). I have not tested it elsewhere.
4. How many APs or wireless networks are broadcasting in your area? There is 2 others nearby (but signal is low) but they are using different channel.
5. Does the issue occur when doing some specific actions, such as copying files, streaming, or gaming? I did speedtest.net and of course opening web page is slow, torrent is crawling, even opening up my wifi router page is slow meaning the speed is slow locally and even on WAN.
6. Is the issue affected by disabling Bluetooth*, uAPSD, or VHT? I did those but no improvement.
7. What is the brand of your system? Dell Inspiron 14 5000 (5447) i5
8. Was the Intel® wireless adapter installed by the system manufacturer? Intel AC 7260 dual band pre-installed at Dell factory.

Please I am at the latest driver available and still problem not solve.

Deil

[DSylv1]

1. Both

2. Windows 8.1

3. At home both via wifi and ethernet. Phone and another laptop using a different network card work perfectly fine on the same wifi i try connectin to.

4. 4 or 5

5. I can barely connect to the internet. Not even a simple webpage like google will load.

6. Still the same.

7. Dell inspiron 17 7000 series

8. Came installed yes. Just bought this machine 3 days ago. Problems keep persisting.

[EVall1]

Hi!

I got some serious with my 7260 card.

Both with speed and BT-connectivity.

Somehow, my NUC didn't realize that the 7260 card is both a Bluetooth-reciver and a Wifi-reciver as well.

The first problem was that Windows saw the card as a Wifi-card and as a unknown USB-device (Windows stated a Code-43 error in device manager, so there were no Bluetooth device but wifi working fine)

During this time (Code-43 time) I got my 7260 card to reach quite nice speed (around 60 mbits on the internet). It was stable as well.

But when I fixed the code-43 error (both Wifi and bluetooth working) the internet-speed is soooo slow.

I can't even reach 5-6 mbits.

Can you (Intel) use this information to something?

[PMans]

I have two laptops with the iwl-7260 card in them, one is a Dell E7440, the other a Lenovo T540p; the former runs openSUSE 13.1 x86-64, the latter Ubuntu 14.04 x86-64, and both dual boot Windows 7pro-x86-64.

Both suffer the same wifi drop problem, basically stop sending and receiving packets, it's a lot worse with Windows

The solution is to drop the connection entirely. It's quite annoying, and as someone says if you're doing long-running file transfers (not necessarily big files if the server is slow), particularly when using windows, you really have to do it over cabled network as wifi will let you down!

This is very annoying, and I have frequently pondered sending a formal complaint to Intel and asking them to loan me indefinitely an older non 802.11-ac card which doesn't suffer the problem, until such time as they fix the 7260ac firmware, because the product is basically defective. It would be interesting to know if Apple have used this card and if it has the same problem.

[Jose_H_Intel1]

Thanks to all of you for the information.

It seems the symptoms are mostly present in the 2.4GHz band in Windows* 8.1. I am not sure how many of you have a dual band router; perhaps it will be a better option to use 5 GHz while we work on the next driver release.

I can also see that disabling Bluetooth* and uAPSD has provided mixed results, which could mean the cause of the issue is not the same for everybody.

[RLubi]

Maybe I'm the exception, but I don't have any version of Windows 8. For me the problems were in Windows 7 SP1. I solved it by swapping the N-7260 for a completely different card. Not everyone has a dual-band router, and that would include me. The only way I could have tried 5ghz first would have been by buying a new router.

[GBals]

Same, I swapped cards to an Intel 6205, very easy process, and everything works just fine. I smell a recall or class action in the air...

[PMans]

On the one hand I had thought it was likely to be a software problem - either with the driver or the firmware (and I'd hoped it'd be in the firmware that's uploaded to the card when the computer boots, rather than in non-rewritable memory).

I was guessing this because if it was hardware then you'd expect dropping the connection and reconnecting wouldn't work - if the PHY was truly locked up then it might need a full power-on reset. However, after some thought, perhaps it is something like an interrupt or DMA in the embedded micro-controller locking up, which cannot be overcome with a software fix and it's thus a fundamental hardware design flaw. When the hardware locks up, the driver can force a reset of that hardware which allows it to reconnect? You couldn't routinely use this if the driver noticed a sudden drop in traffic as it might take too long?

it is odd that the connection can work for some indeterminate time, which appears unrelated to the volume of traffic points, and suggests some unusual condition happening, perhaps a corrupted frame due to congestion? Mine just failed having received just 10883 packets (freshly booted laptop) and sent 384. No errors reported:

$ ifconfig wlan0

wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 7c:7a:91:xx:xx:xx

UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1

RX packets:10883 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0

TX packets:384 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0

collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000

RX bytes:1294045 (1.2 MB) TX bytes:117637 (117.6 KB)

that was on 2.4GHz, thus:

$ iwconfig wlan0

wlan0 IEEE 802.11abgn ESSID:"xxxxxxxxxxxxxx"

Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: E0:46:9A:xx:xx:xx

Bit Rate=216 Mb/s Tx-Power=16 dBm

Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off

Encryption key:off

Power Management:on

Link Quality=61/70 Signal level=-49 dBm

Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0

Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:32 Missed beacon:0

I've personally seen it now on four of these cards across two different makes of laptops, so it's not a specific rare problem, so this is pervasive. What amazes me is that Intel say they cannot reproduce this problem, which I actually don't believe. My current working assumption therefore is that they are stalling for time, hoping they can find a work-round that hides the problem which can't be fixed properly in software/firmware.

It's time for Intel to 'fess up and do the right thing. Produce a version 2 of the card which works properly and have a full recall/replacement program; it won't be cheap but it would be The Right Thing To Do. I'm expecting Intel to delete this message and maintain their stance of plausible deniability.

joe_intel, it's time to tell us what Intel have actually found and are going to do about it?

[PMans]

I have raised an official warranty claim with Intel asking to swap the card for one without the problems, happy to lose 802.11ac.

[RVinc3]

I bought a Dell Inspiron 14 7000 (windows 8.1) unfortunately with N 7260 wifi card. The card does not work, is not stable and very slow. Download / Upload from local nas transfers data at less than 1mbs.Non there are problems with AP is because other PCs work well. (Different wifi card)

The driver is the most recent. Assistance from Dell talks about new driveer.

Intel wants to quickly resolve the problem?

I can not work!

PS The problem to 2,4Ghz

Roberto