ex horto conclvso

RTL8723be wifi and Debian Jessie

Just a quick pointer for those who are using the Realtek RTL8723BE Wireless LAN card in a notebook (Lenovo, HP), and are suffering ridiculously instable or dropping connections. The problem is most likely originating from the power saving mode, which is enabled by default. While power saving is generally a good idea, it doesn’t play well with some AP’s that don’t support the 802.11 power save protocol.

To solve this, create a file in /etc/modprobe.d/ (you could conveniently call it rtl8723be.conf) that contains the line below, and reboot.

options rtl8723be fwlps=N ips=N

Am I using RTL8723BE?

You probably are if you ended up reading this. But to be sure, run the following command and see if the card is mentioned in the output. (If it isn’t, and you already executed the code above: don’t worry, it doens’t hurt your system).

less /proc/modules

Is this breaking anything?

No, it just disables power save. Here is a short explanation:

fwlps=N # disable "linked fw control power save"
ips=N   # disable "no link power save"

Enjoy the stable connection.