Comment # 2 on bug 1017271 from Larry Finger

I predict that the OP has an HP laptop. On some models, they included only a
single antenna, and miscoded the EEPROM to indicate that that antenna was
attached to the other connector. It has been encountered by many users as shown
in the Issues associated with the referenced GitHub repo.

The ant_sel module parameter was added to the driver in kernel 4.7 specifically
to handle this one condition. The only other fix is to open the machine and
move the antenna cable to the other connector; however, there are reports that
doing this breaks the Windows driver.

The GitHub repo was created to backport upstream changes like this so that
users of earlier kernels would have access to new features. In this case, it
seems to have worked as intended.

In short, this work around was devised to correct a HARDWARE misconfiguration,
and I am not aware of any better solution. In any case, it is not a software
bug.