Before function wifi_connect is executed, starting the WiFi driver should have been finished. This is indicated by the WiFi driver by sending event SYSTEM_EVENT_STA_START. Function wifi_connect is moved therefore to the event handler for SYSTEM_EVENT_STA_START.
The size of received and transmitted frames was stored in an uint8_t, which did not allow to process frames larger than 255 octets. However, WiFi has an MTU of 1500 octets.