I was doing a fresh rsync backup of the home directory on a laptop I hadn't previously backed up. I noticed that with the verbose option enabled, rsync was reporting about 55 KB/s upload speed -- about as good as dial-up modem speed. I don't know if it's always been this bad for a while, or if I was only noticing it when looking at a program that was continuously reporting the upload speed.
I noticed that when I switched from home wifi to phone tethering, the upload speed went up to about 1 MB/s, which isn't what I would expect. I didn't want to run into some hidden data cap by uploading 100 GB over my cell phone, so I kept looking.
I found the fix on a six-year-old forum page: edit /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf" and change the line wifi.powersave = 3towifi.powersave = 2`.
After I did this, and reconnected to my home wifi, rsync started reporting between 2 MB/s and 4 MB/s. Even at the low end of that range, that's a 36x speedup from editing one line in a config file.
I don't know what "WiFi Powersave" is or why turning it on makes your connection 36 to 75 times slower. Nor do I know why the "make your connection 36 to 75 times slower setting" is the default in Ubuntu. Nor do I know why even with the "make your Internet slow" setting enabled, using my phone as an access point was still fast while using my home wifi resulted in dialup speed.
Why is this the default??
