This quick tip will show you how to speed up your wireless internet in Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty by disabling the power management for the wireless chipset.

For most wireless chipsets, a simple tweak on disabling the power management is sufficient for increasing the speed and the connection quality of your wireless internet. The price you pay is obviously an increase in power consumption, although this increase isn’t much.

To get started, press Ctrl+Alt+T to open a terminal window. When it opens, run:

iwconfig

You’ll see something like this, which mean your wireless device is wlan0 and power management is on. When it’s off, or when no mention is made of Power Management at all, you obviously don’t need to do anything.

ppp0      no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

lo        no wireless extensions.

wlan0     IEEE 802.11bgn  ESSID:off/any  
          Mode:Managed  Access Point: Not-Associated   Tx-Power=19 dBm   
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:on

To disable Power Management, run command to edit config file:

sudo gedit /etc/pm/power.d/wireless

Copy and paste below into the empty file and save it. You may change wlan0 to your wireless device name.

#!/bin/sh
/sbin/iwconfig wlan0 power off

disable-power-management

Change the permission:

sudo chmod 755 /etc/pm/power.d/wireless

Reboot your machine and done.