I'm having an issue with a E200HA running Ubuntu 18.04LTS. Recently my wifi has started dropping at random times. I've looked for answers and tried:

using the original firmware drivers from the install disk

using the latest firmware drivers from github

using the firmware drivers from ubuntu 16.04LTS

using a different browser

every different combination of board.bin, board-2.bin, firmware-5.bin and firmware-6.bin, old and new versions

setting a static ip address,

a complete reinstall of Ubuntu

yet the problem won't go away. I didn't have this problem when the machine had Windows 10 on it, nor for the first couple of years with Ubuntu.

Also the output of ping varies - sometimes it's "network is unreachable", sometimes "Destination host unreachable"

Sometimes I get a question mark in the taskbar, sometimes a blank space, but it can still detect the network.

I don't think it's the router - I'm running other machines with different OS (Mac, W10, Android and Mint19) and have no issues with those.

Any help or suggestions would be very much appreciated


wilbur@wilbur-E200HA:~$ sudo lshw -class network
[sudo] password for wilbur:
*-network
description: Wireless interface
product: QCA9377 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter
vendor: Qualcomm Atheros
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
logical name: wlp1s0
version: 31
serial: f0:03:8c:a2:28:59
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=ath10k_pci driverversion=5.2.0+ firmware=WLAN.TF.1.0-00267-1 ip=192.168.1.6 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11
resources: irq:133 memory:91200000-913fffff

wilbur@wilbur-E200HA:~$ lspci -knn | grep Net -A2
01:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter [168c:0042] (rev 31)
Subsystem: AzureWave QCA9377 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter [1a3b:2b31]
Kernel driver in use: ath10k_pci
Kernel modules: ath10k_pci

I've had this issue recently with another wifi/box.

What I did was an ls-lh on the suspicious firmware, and where they were the same size, an md5sum. Then, based on wifi complaints or lack thereof, choose the firmware you're going to trust.

Also, check with iwconfig. There is a figure for "Quality." You want good quality, especially for the faster protocols, particularly 802.11n. I the Quality is bad, (Under 40 as a rule of thumb is poor, under 30 risky) you'll be reduced to very poor speeds and low quality Wifi cards will drop out or stumble as they switch protocols. I've got service where I had to spend 5-6 hours downloading a 200MB video. I couldn't stream it, or it would die.