The TV's Wi-Fi keeps dropping

Wi-Fi disconnections on older televisions are a classic. The cause is rarely just one thing.

Check the real state#

adb shell dumpsys wifi | head -30

And the signal quality:

adb shell cat /proc/net/wireless

The level value tells you the received strength. Below -70 dBm you are going to have problems whatever you do.

The causes, by frequency#

1. Marginal signal. Televisions carry modest aerials and usually sit flat against a wall, sometimes with their own metal panel in the way. This is cause number one.

2. Power saving. Some models shut the Wi-Fi radio down in standby and do not recover it well. Look under Settings → Network for something like "keep Wi-Fi on during sleep".

3. 5 GHz with poor reach. 5 GHz is faster and passes through walls worse. If the television is far from the router, force it to 2.4 GHz.

4. A congested channel. In a block of flats, 2.4 GHz channel 6 is usually saturated. Changing it on the router is free and sometimes fixes everything.

5. A duplicate IP. If the router assigns the same address to two devices, the disconnections are intermittent and baffling. Reserving a fixed IP rules it out.

Where cleaning up does help#

If the television is short on memory, the system kills processes to survive, and sometimes the network process is the one that goes. Freeing memory reduces disconnections as a side effect. Not the cause, but a factor.

The solution that always works#

An ethernet cable. If the television has an RJ45 port and you can reach it with a cable, the problem is over. It is not elegant and it is the most effective answer on this list.

If you cannot cable it, a USB-ethernet adapter works on many Android TVs and costs little.