📚 Is it just me - WiFi issues with AX200 or do people just not care as long as it “works”?

TLDR

Solutions I tired - they all work somewhat, some work better than others, so try them out

1. Look at the system logs if there is connection roaming between access points, try pinning WiFi connection to a specific BSSID - try out both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz BSSIDs

2. Try setting the correct WiFi region code if some generic code is preset in your distro

3. Try disabling WiFi power management

Start of rant >

I’ve been having persistent WiFi issues in my Asus Strix 15 with an Intel AX200 WiFi card in both Fedora and OpenSUSE TW.

I can connect to the AP just fine and get internet connectivity. But ping was very slow - like 200-300ms average.

And frequently, like every 2-3 minutes, ping spikes into the thousands - 2000 to 3000ms when pinging just the access point IP.

YouTube playback was fine @720P, but other streaming sites that have less optimized video formats or don’t effectively pre-buffer videos - ones that I use to watch “semi legal” K -Dramas and C-Dramas never seemed to stream without interruption.

In Fedora, disabling the power management seemed to help with the consistent high ping. But the ping spikes remained.

Looking at the system logs, I found that the WiFi card was frequently “roaming” between the 2.4 and 5Ghz bands causing the ping spikes.

All this with an Intel AX200 card, which is supposed to “work great out of the box in Linux” - that is what people said when I asked for recommendations, to switch the card without telling them it was the AX200 that I’m having trouble with.

All the while, I’m getting consistent 1-3ms pings in windows.

At this point I’ve dealt with it as much as I can. By pinning the connection to the 5Ghz band BSSID. This works in both Fedora and OpenSUSE TW.

Other things I’ve tried are disabling the power management. Setting the WiFi region code for the country I’m in. They helped somewhat,

But pinning the connection to the BSSID resolved it to my satisfaction even without the other two.

The spikes are resolved and then average ping times are in the 4-8ms range. Still not as good as in windows but extremely good from what it was originally. But it is good enough to even game comfortably.

So, I was just wondering - is this kind of issues prevalent and are people just not aware as long as they get some kind of connectivity often blaming “slowness” on the router or something else? Or did I get a dud WiFi card?

Or is my AP really that nonstandard (it is a cheap piece of crap that the ISP provided) that it is an edge case? But performance in windows makes me assume this isn’t the case.

I cannot think of any other reasons why a “well supported” WiFi card would cause so much issue. If you can think of one, let me know.

< End of rant