Wifi-less Nexus 5

A couple days ago, some time between 6-9PM, the wifi on my Nexus 5 turned off, and wouldn’t turn back on again.

Rebooting the phone didn’t help.

Attempts to re-enable wifi (Settings/Wi-Fi) just ended up timing out with no results, and the wifi disabled itself again.

Bluetooth still works.  Cell service and data still works.  Just no wifi.

After doing a factory reset yesterday, my Nexus 5 started behaving even more strangely.  There were lots of random freezes and spontaneous reboots while using the phone.

Even more strangely, sometimes the wifi would come back on, but only for about 30 seconds or so.  Very intermittent and not at all reproducible.  Wifi would flash back on briefly after a reboot, but then get disabled again.  Most times wifi just stays disabled.

Time to think about getting a new phone I think.  If it was just the lack of wifi, I could probably deal with it.  The random freezes and reboots are more problematic though.  This one has lasted 4 years (a refurb I received when my original developed screen issues and then needed a repair for the infamous power button issue), which is pretty impressive for cell phones these days.

I suppose this might be a good opportunity to give LineageOS a whirl to see if that will help with the wifi issue.

Update: After a few more reboots, the phone stabilized and there weren’t any more random freezes or reboots.  Still no wifi though.  Installed LineageOS onto the phone, which went well.  Didn’t resolve the wifi issue though, so it’s probably hardware related.  On the plus side, the phone is now at Android 7.1.4 (Nougat).