Linux Questions

I don't have an answer because your glitch is very specific. It only happened with a combination of circumstances and hardware: in a particular place with a particular router. Even if your laptop is old, however, and its wifi chip is now supported by the kernel, there's a chance that in the past it was not fully supported by the kernel, which means people might have had to manually compile and install a driver for that particular wifi card/chip to improve performance. So, find out what wifi hardware it is do a search. You'll maybe find old posts about drivers to compile and install separately where information will be provided about what made it malfunction in the past. That's one of the best ways to get the answer to your question because kernel devs wouldn't be discussing their use cases with the hardware. People who use the hardware and develop separate drivers to solve problems will have discussed it in the past. Off the top of my head, there was a user / developer that used the handle lwfinger that pushed out a ton of Realtek wifi drivers to solve compatibility issues.