I’m running Fedora on an AI Max 300 Framework 13”. I’m building a little web app and in development running the server on the laptop. I’m testing on mobile just connecting to the server over the LAN, and when the client starts, and especially when it pulls any significant data, the laptop wifi will silently just stop working. Fedora still shows it connected, but she no worky.
dmesg and iw show nothing interesting, no errors or drops. I’ve added bandwidth limiting just for the purposes of testing locally in case it was that, but I’ve capped it to 1M/s outgoing from the laptop and I’m still getting this happening.
Real bummer, makes it nearly impossible to develop on this laptop. I see other posts about random issues with the wifi but nothing that matched this. Again, I haven’t been able to find a single error message or warning in any relevant output… it just kind of craps the bed and I have to turn wifi off and on and reconnect to get network access.
It may not be the output from the laptop where the issue is. It may be getting flooded with requests on the input side; look at the traffic in both directions.
Understandably, this is just a development test, maybe try hosting the server on something hardwired or hardwiring the laptop to the LAN temporarily to ensure everything is working as intended.
I was pretty careful with the protocol but figured you might be right, so checked with tcpdump, Claude’s analysis of it is:
This looks pretty benign, honestly. A few observations:
The burst phase (first ~6 seconds): Your server is sending texture data at a reasonable rate — roughly 800 packets × 1448 bytes ≈ 1.1MB over 6 seconds. That’s only ~1.5 Mbps sustained. Not heavy at all.
The steady state (after ~19:50:09): Just WebSocket heartbeats — tiny 2-byte pings going out, 6-byte pongs coming back, once per second. Negligible.
Also noted that for incoming connections it’s just 5-6 requests total for app startup, which is often where the wifi dies. And 5 concurrent connections for texture loading.
And yeah, for deployment this’ll be in a GCP VM. But I’m just very confused why this laptop seems unable to handle a quite modest amount of traffic to another machine on the same LAN, and it’s confusing that I can’t find a single error in any system log about the wifi when it happens - it’s an invisible failure and the wifi believes it’s connected, just times out on all traffic.
Oh, almost forgot: I’ve tested and this works 100% fine over cabled Ethernet on this laptop.
You might contact support as the card itself might be defective. More likely though this is just a “feature” of the MediaTek cards. Not a lot of users are happy with them.
I got rid of the one from my Framework 16 and all the strange WiFi stuff went almost entirely away when I put the Intel AX210 card in. Doesn’t matter that it did not get the higher thruput; at least it stayed connected and the Bluetooth didn’t randomly disconnect.
As frustrating as it sounds, buying and replacing the card with the Intel one will probably solve this and lots of future problems. Thanks for reporting back.