I have tried many different forums and solutions for this issue and have still not found any resolution. I am running an Intel AX210 card and on Ubuntu, and various opinionated flavors of Arch (CachyOS, Omarchy), I seem to be stuck at a max of 20 Mbps download. It isn’t always 20 Mbps but it ALWAYS caps there.
I am dual booting with Windows 11 and have turned off Fast startup using the command powercfg /h off since it is no longer in the Control Panel UI. I get speeds of over 300 Mbps on Windows consistently.
I am currently on CachyOS with KDE Plasma and Limine as the boot loader, just because it’s what I’m most familiar with. I have an Ubuntu install media if necessary.
I think it’s safe to assume that the width being 20 MHz here is an issue.
As an additional note on KDE, in the Network Panel I see speeds go up a couple of bytes, and then the wifi symbol in the top left gets a blue loading symbol on top of it, and then the speeds drop down to 0, but I do not fully disconnect from the network, and it comes back in a second or two but remains slow.
From what others are seeing, it often comes down to things like regulatory domain, firmware/kernel alignment, or AP compatibility causing HT/VHT to get disabled.
There’s also a more technical kernel report here if you want to go deeper:
All of those links seem to redirect to other pages, but I have been through those different forums looking for solutions and sometimes while the situation matches, the solution does not resolve my issue.
CachyOS’ wiki has a dedicated Post Install section that I have following to configure the regulatory domain, but even after configuring, I am still stuck at 20 Mbps. (I cannot link to the page, but if you look up “Post Install | CachyOS”, you should find it)
As for firmware/kernel alignment, I have verified that I have the corresponding versions for both, but also it should not be a problem since Cachy is easy install.
For the AP compatibility, I am using Xfinity’s XB7 gateway. I feel like this could possibly be an issue since Xfinity tends to really lock down their gateway preferences, but I am leaving calling their support team as a last resort.
Maybe you could resend the links and I could verify if I have tried the solutions there. Also thanks for the welcome!
Ok, then maybe I am just not familiar with how the threads apply to my issue. I am getting passed through to the pages and these are the thread names:
FIRST URL POST TITLE: [Solved] TTY Screen freeze on login with new hardware - I am not having screen freezes and don’t see any reference to the AX210 on this post
SECOND URL POST TITLE: Request for 8265NGW certification test report - Title doesn’t match the url of the link so I assume this is not the correct article, but again it doesn’t seem to apply
THIRD URL POST TITLE: How can I achieve automatic login to the nomachine web client without providing access credentials? - Seems to be the same issue as the second
FOURTH URL POST TITLE: Hibernation not working because of xhci_hcd - I don’t seem to have any hibernation issues
I am in the exact same boat here with my AX210. I’ve even gone as far as to swap from networkmanager to iwd (and remembered to disable any nm services so they don’t conflict). It worked for like, half an hour then regressed to the same 20mbps cap. My iw dev info also shows width: 20 MHz (no HT). I went through all the same threads as op too lol. This is driving me bonkers.
Welcome to the forums @fur Thanks for adding that. Very interesting. The “worked for ~ 30 minutes then regressed” part especially suggests something in the environment is triggering the fallback, not just a missing setting.
Did you also already trying to set up a 5G hotspot from your smartphone just to see what width you get?
I tested on my phone’s hotspot and I am experiencing the same issue where I can see the network speeds dropping to 0 in the KDE network panel.
I would make the assumption, this means it’s probably not an issue with my network config, rather it may be a regression in the firmware / kernel or an issue with my network card / motherboard (though I would probably rule out the ladder since they work just fine with my Windows install).
I don’t think this is a hardware limitation of the Intel AX210 itself, but rather a Linux-side negotiation issue.
From your iw dev output, the key problem is that your connection is stuck at 20 MHz channel width, which directly explains the ~20 Mbps cap. On 5 GHz, you should normally see 40/80 MHz (or even higher), which aligns with your 300+ Mbps speeds on Windows.
This kind of behavior has been reported before on Linux, often related to:
regulatory domain restrictions (REGDOMAIN not set correctly)
Iwlwifi driver/firmware limitations
router compatibility or fallback behavior
In some cases, Intel cards can silently limit themselves to 20 MHz if the regulatory domain is unclear or misdetected.
I would suggest checking:
iw reg get
If it shows 00, try setting your country explicitly:
sudo iw reg set <your_country_code>
Also worth testing:
different 5 GHz channels (e.g. 36-48 instead of DFS channels)
disabling power saving in iwlwifi
verifying router is actually allowing 80 MHz bandwidth
Since Windows reaches full speed on the same setup, this strongly points to a Linux driver/regulatory issue rather than RF conditions or hardware failure.
iw reg get
global
country US: DFS-FCC
...
phy#0 (self-managed)
country US: DFS-UNSET
I have tried the following but it’s always possible I was looking at outdated steps:
Do you have links to any updated docs that outline the steps? Especially for the power saving, I have seen about 6 different ways to do it and none of them have seemed to work. Also the third one may be a bit tougher with Xfinity’s restrictions, but I will look into it later today.
This is a regulatory domain issue. Your output shows DFS-UNSET for phy, which means Intel LAR failed to determine your region.
When that happens, the device operates in a restricted mode and may limit channel width (often falling back to 20 MHz), which explains the ~20 Mbps cap.
This is not mainly a router issue - it’s the client being restricted by regulatory rules.
Despite running sudo iw reg set US and restarting, my iw reg get output also shows
phy#0 (self-managed)
country US: DFS-UNSET
Since I am also running CachyOS I tried what Blue_Bird suggested and attempted to install linux-firmware-git. Since it is in the AUR I used yay. First I ran into a keyring error. After bypassing it with an integrity check switch I then ran into another error about package ownership and gave up, not wanting to break anything further. Downloading that took like half an hour+ because of the speed cap lmao.
Right, I had read that these cards had an issue with LAR.
The old fix was to disable LAR in /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf with options iwlwifi lar_disable=1, but it looks like this option was removed in more recent kernels (5.5 and later).
Do you have suggestions for how I can work around this? I have seen AUR packages for this but none of them appear to be updated to the latest kernel.
EDIT: Just found an updated package in the AUR up to 6.19.10. Will try when I get home later today.
If iwlwifi-lar-patched is the one, I tried it and sadly had no luck. I may have missed something as I’m not extremely advanced when it comes to this stuff so ya should still give it a shot. A year or so ago I had no issues and never expected needing to dive through so many forums just so my wifi adapter wasn’t larping as an xbox from 2005 xD. I read somewhere that the kernel stores firmware for network drivers and as a shot in the dark tried booting the LTS kernel and had no luck there. Also big appreciation to everyone trying to help us solve this.
