[Bradford] Realtek RTL8723BE woes

[John Robert Hudson]

Hi all

I have been installing Linux on an HP desktop with the Realtek RTL8723BE wi-fi 
chip and hit a number  of problems. Initially it was disconnecting after a 
while and I used a tip from Google about adding

options rtl8723be fwlps=0

to /etc/modprobe.d/rtl8723be.conf.

This solved the problem of the connection going down but a new problem arose: 
a periodically slow connection.

iwconfig produced

wlan0     IEEE 802.11bgn  ESSID:"BTHub5-265F"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.462 GHz  Access Point: D4:63:FE:07:25:69
          Bit Rate=72.2 Mb/s   Tx-Power=20 dBm
          Retry short limit:7   RTS thr=2347 B   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=36/70  Signal level=-74 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:8   Missed beacon:0

Comparison with other devices on the network showed that their Bit Rate was 1 
Mb/s [but when I got home I found that my laptop, with an  an Atheros chip 
using the ath9k driver, showed 72.2Mb/s at home as opposed to 1 Mb/s at my 
friend’s house].

So I tried to reduce the Bit Rate with

iwconfig wlan0 rate 40M auto

This appeared to work for one session but has not worked since.

I did wonder about trying

iwconfig wlan0 rate 1M auto

as that was the rate that other devices were showing at my friend’s house but 
did not as the iwconfig did not appear to have any effect anyhow.

demesg showed

[   13.692842] rtl8723be: Using firmware rtlwifi/rtl8723befw.bin
[   13.693674] ieee80211 phy0: Selected rate control algorithm 'rtl_rc'
[   13.694439] rtlwifi: rtlwifi: wireless switch is on

but I can only find questions and no answers to how to change the rate control 
algorithm, if that is the way forward.

Further enquiries led to ifcfg-wlan0 which is created by wpa_supplicant and 
contained the line

WIRELESS_BITRATE=''auto"

However I could find no documentation for it suggesting whether this was a way 
forward for managing the occasional slowdowns.

NB during the installation wicked was used to manage the network; as it was 
also recommended in one post as better for dealing with the first problem, I 
have not tried NetworkManager.

Any advice/assistance gratefully received.

John