So I recently upgraded to 100+ MBit/s internet access, after navigating Comcast's purchasing process. However, not everything can support those sorts of speeds. So, I purchased an Intel PCI card that can handle gigabit speeds, for my old XPS-8300, and also a new wireless adapter (AC, dual-band). The PCI card has been a disappointment, not being able to pull down more than 20 Mbits/s, but the wifi has been much better, getting an average of 114 Mbit/s down and the same ~5 mbits/s up. It also has Bluetooth, which is fun to use for the first time ever.
Unfortunately, there have been strange issues with maintaining access to the network on the new cards. Sometimes connections get dropped on the 5 GHz network. For now, I'm attempting to alleviate that issue by restricting the 5GHz connection to 20 MHz spread instead of 40, which drops the speed to around 80 Mbits/s but also gives me channel 165 (center frequency 5825 MHz) all to myself to avoid interference from neighboring traffic.
The new Lenovo Thinkpad T460p laptop also has a persistent issue across several Linux kernels, in that the wireless chip is not supported by a recent kernel version (4.6 or 4.7), leading to the wifi just dropping out unexpectedly for a few moments, every six-seven minutes. That's unacceptable. There are some fixes, but they're not good enough, so I've been trying out different OSes, keeping in mind potentially putting VMWare Workstation on the final result. For now Fedora KDE is installed, but I may try debian as the fix to the iwlwifi driver there might work better.
Worst comes to worst, I'll try RHEL and put VMWare workstation on it for the VMs. I purchased the machine for pentesting in VMs, for general VM practice, and not much else, therefore it doesn't matter what runs underneath.
Unfortunately, there have been strange issues with maintaining access to the network on the new cards. Sometimes connections get dropped on the 5 GHz network. For now, I'm attempting to alleviate that issue by restricting the 5GHz connection to 20 MHz spread instead of 40, which drops the speed to around 80 Mbits/s but also gives me channel 165 (center frequency 5825 MHz) all to myself to avoid interference from neighboring traffic.
The new Lenovo Thinkpad T460p laptop also has a persistent issue across several Linux kernels, in that the wireless chip is not supported by a recent kernel version (4.6 or 4.7), leading to the wifi just dropping out unexpectedly for a few moments, every six-seven minutes. That's unacceptable. There are some fixes, but they're not good enough, so I've been trying out different OSes, keeping in mind potentially putting VMWare Workstation on the final result. For now Fedora KDE is installed, but I may try debian as the fix to the iwlwifi driver there might work better.
Worst comes to worst, I'll try RHEL and put VMWare workstation on it for the VMs. I purchased the machine for pentesting in VMs, for general VM practice, and not much else, therefore it doesn't matter what runs underneath.
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