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Comment by not_your_vase | Hacker News Reader

Personally I would be happy with any kind of stable wireless support, even the most unsecure or obsolete one. My Pi3 and Pi4 both can't maintain stable wifi connection for more than a week. After that they simply become unresponsive on the network - I got to unload and reload the driver to make them communicate through the network. I solved this on one of them by simply connecting though ethernet, but the other one is still a constant pain.

I have given up using built-in Bluetooth and Wifi at the same time years ago, when they were interfering with each other. Nevertheless, I wonder if that is still the case.

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I have six Raspberry Pi's (from the Pi Zero W all the way to the Pi 4) plus several other wifi microcontrollers (ESP8266, ESP32, Pico W etc) doing things around my home and they all happily sit on my wireless network without an issue. Is it possible that your home is subject to some kind of interference that they are struggling to cope with?

I used to work support for an ISP and we would always get customers calling up complaining that our wifi router was shit, but it almost always turned out to be some weird unshielded device causing electrical interference (I remember we would always get a glut of these calls around December when people plugged their cheap Christmas tree lights in!).

How do you find out which device is the cause?

Our family home has a strangely cursed wifi, after changing 4 routers it seems to have stabilised, but I still dont know why

I have many other devices also on the same network: 2 iPads 24/7, Mac Mini 24/7, 2 Linux laptops running at least 16h/day, smartphones, PS3, PS4, etc etc... in a small apartment. I'm a city dweller, wifi routers trying to scream over each other, there are like 50 networks visible where I sit. But: if there is some interference, I would expect at least some other devices to expose the same behavior, at least occasionally. But exclusively only the Rpis are doing this - after 4-10 days of uptime, they just give up on the wireless network, without any error message or any other clue.

Nevertheless, I have done countless hours of troubleshooting and investigations, and not looking for more anymore. RPis are great for many things, and pretty crappy for many other things. I found their wireless capabilities to be on the crappier side.

> I got to unload and reload the driver to make them communicate through the network

Here are my unrequested 2 cents: if this solves the issue, have a systemd (or cron) timer do that for you. Sure it's duck tape, but it would make it way less painful than having to do it manually each week.

Have you turned off power saving?

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