How to Manage Available Wireless Network Priority?

Question

I'd like to move up and down available wireless access points, setting priorities as we can do in Microsoft Windows. I can't remember to have ever succeeded in this since using network-manager. Maybe something with conf files is possible...

I'm not interested in different network managers.

Accepted Answer

Apparently in 2014 NetworkManager team introduced such a feature -- to specify priorities for different networks. There is now connection.autoconnect-priority.

This article provides lots of information on how to interface NetworkManager via nmcli.

For example with

nmcli -f NAME,UUID,AUTOCONNECT,AUTOCONNECT-PRIORITY c

you can list known networks and see their default priority to be 0. Now I have run

nmcli connection modify HOME-WIFI connection.autoconnect-priority 10

to give my home WiFi higher priority. I have the same work WiFi points available at home as well, but need to connect to HOME-WIFI when I am home. That command heavily rewritten /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/HOME-WIFI which added autoconnect-priority=10 into [connection] section - time will show if it works as it should.

Answer 2

Can WiFi priority be dragged up and down in NetworkManager?

The short answer is “Not yet.” As of mid 2018, Ubuntu has nothing as easy as Microsoft Windows for setting the WiFi priority. However, there are ways to accomplish what you want.

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TL;DR? Summary

For command line use nmcli. For GUI, plasma-nm.

nmcli -f autoconnect-priority,name c
nmcli c mod "mypreferred" conn.autoconnect-p 10
nmcli c mod "xfinitywifi" conn.autoconnect-p -10

or

apt install plasma-nm
kde5-nm-connection-editor

How to Manage Available Wireless Network Priority?

6 Answers

Can WiFi priority be dragged up and down in NetworkManager?

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TL;DR? Summary

Elena Rostova