Permanently Disable WiFi Power Management

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Sometimes folks report lost WiFi connections - one reason can be the WiFi power management deciding to lower the power consumption of the WiFi chip.

To see if power management is on:

$ iwconfig wlan0
...
wlan0     IEEE 802.11  ESSID:"MYSSID"  
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.452 GHz  Access Point: xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx   
          Bit Rate=65 Mb/s   Tx-Power=31 dBm   
          Retry short limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:on                  <-- POWER MANAGEMENT is ON

=== INSTALL WIRELESS-TOOLS for iwconfig

sudo apt-get install wireless-tools

=== TURN POWER MANAGEMENT OFF to limit Tx excessive retries and ping request timeouts

set temporarily with:
sudo iwconfig wlan0 power off

set permanently with:
See (wifi - Make "iw wlan0 set power_save off" permanent - Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange

$ sudo systemctl --full --force edit wifi_powersave@.service

[Unit]
Description=Set WiFi power save %i
After=sys-subsystem-net-devices-wlan0.device

[Service]
Type=oneshot
RemainAfterExit=yes
ExecStart=/sbin/iw dev wlan0 set power_save %i

[Install]
WantedBy=sys-subsystem-net-devices-wlan0.device

Then

$ sudo systemctl enable wifi_powersave@off.service

and reboot.

(Check it with “iwconfig wlan0” again)

If ever want it back on:

$ sudo systemctl disable wifi_powersave@off.service  
$ sudo systemctl enable wifi_powersave@on.service

===== Another method ====
Supposedly there is a simpler method, (with a different effective time during the boot):

Add a line to /etc/rc.local

/sbin/iwconfig wlan0 power off

ahead of exit 0

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