WiFi and Bluetooth dropouts with Realtek in Linux

WiFi and Bluetooth stuttering on Realtek RTL8852CE under Debian is caused by broken newer firmware. Forcing the older firmware fixes the issue, pointing to an rtw89 incompatibility.

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By. Jacob

Jacob Kristensen (Turbulentarius) is a Web Developer based in Denmark. He is currently pursuing a Bachelor's degree in Web Development at Zealand, focusing on learning React and refining his existing skills.

Edited: 2026-02-08 19:16

Symptoms: Wi-Fi and/or Bluetooth stutters significantly during Wi-Fi uploads or downloads. The issue occurs on both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz access points, indicating that it is not caused by interference or network congestion. Changing the Wi-Fi channel does not resolve the problem.

I have two laptops with Realtek cards in them, and both of them suffers from the same issue. One is an older HP EliteBook, and another is a Lenovo ThinkBook 16 G7.

The problem appears to be a firmware issue with RTL8852CE. For Debian users, when you install the non-free-firmware or realtek-firmware package, it will automatically load a newer and broken firmware, but the fix is pretty simple.

Fix: Simply renaming the newer .bin files to .bin.disabled and rebooting will automatically load the workong older firmware, as also described here.

Once the realtek-firmware package is installed, .bin files should be located in /lib/firmware/rtw89/. E.g:

rtw8851b_fw.bin
rtw8852a_fw.bin
rtw8852b_fw-1.bin
rtw8852b_fw.bin
rtw8852bt_fw.bin
rtw8852c_fw-1.bin.disabled
rtw8852c_fw-2.bin.disabled
rtw8852c_fw.bin
rtw8922a_fw-1.bin
rtw8922a_fw-2.bin
rtw8922a_fw-3.bin
rtw8922a_fw-4.bin
rtw8922a_fw.bin

I simply renamed a couple of files to force it to load the rtw8852bt_fw.bin version, which is known to work for many of us. Interestingly.

I also tested a newer version of the realtek-firmware package from Debian backports, but this did not resolve the issue. This suggests a possible compatibility problem with the kernel’s rtw89 driver. While updating the driver manually via DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support) or installing a newer kernel from backports is an option, reports indicate that the issue persists even on more recent kernels.

Driver or Firmware?

There's both the proprietary firmware, which is installed separately, and then there's the driver, which lives in the kernel of your Linux distribution.

I have a theory that the problem is caused by an incompatibility issue with the rtw89 driver. Previously this was maintained by Larry Finger (lwfinger) on GitHub, but he has passed away, and now it seems to have been forked by morrownr here.

Simply installing rtw89 manually is not necessarily going to fix the problem, as the kernel integrated version might actually be newer then the one you are installing.

Check your Network Controller

To check which Network Controller you are using, try running these commands:

sudo lspci -nn | grep -i network

Output:

02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8852CE PCIe 802.11ax Wireless Network Controller [10ec:c852] (rev 01)

Sources

Bluetooth Audio Stuttering During WiFi Activity on RTL8852CE - discussion.fedoraproject.org
RTW8852C Bluetooth Audio Fix for Fedora - github.com
RTL8852CE bluetooth wifi coexistence - bbs.archlinux.org

Driver or Firmware?

Check your Network Controller

Sources

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