Wireless Drops on Pop OS 20.10 and Later

Upon the release of Pop OS 20.10, my System76 laptop and my Arris router started having some disagreements. The laptop would drop connection every couple hours and not reconnect itself. I’d see the little question mark in the WIFI indicator, and I needed to manually turn WIFI off and back on to restore the connection.

I found mentions of this behavior in Ubuntu and in Pop OS forums, and supposedly newer NetworkManager from Gnome would fix it, so I suffered and waited for the beta of Pop OS 21.04 to be available. That didn’t fix it, so I started digging around some more in System76’s page for Troubleshooting Wireless.

I picked my way through the tips and applied some of them. Disabling band steering in the router finally seems to have fixed the problem. I’ve kept my WIFI connection up and running for days now. I didn’t need to name the 5GHz and 2.4GHz networks differently.