Arch Linux

moihack

Member

Registered: 2014-12-28

Posts: 1

Wireless question

Hello!
I've recently got an acer laptop which has the BCM43228 as wireless chipset.

I followed the wiki here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/broadcom_wireless and installed the b43 driver and firmware.
I got wireless and managed to connect to my network.

However I have the following problem.
I suffer from really high packet loss (I can't even ping the router or google sometimes - 100% packet loss)

Sometimes it justs works fines but that's only for some seconds. After that I still experience great packet loss.
Even basic browsing stuff, or even syncing pacman mirrors hangs....

If I get next to the router the problem disappears.
However my room is only 5 meters away from the router and the only obstacle is the room's wooden door (but the problem also happens when the door is open - no other obstacles around).

iwconfig reports a txpower of 20dBm and a constantly changing Bit rate which is stuck at 1Mb/s when suffering from the packet loss. When it works find for some seconds it gets up to 18Mb/s+
power management is off as well as iwconfig reports
Signal at kde network manager shows as full

I also have another computer and an android smartphone and their wifi is working great at the same room.

Now, since brcmsmac isn't supporting my card yet, I decided to give the proprietary Broadcom driver a try.

Again using the above link, I managed to blacklist the bcma and b43 modules and load wl on boot.

Now wireless works really great. I've almost zero packet loss.
Now I sync/download packaged with 1500kb/s while I was getting maximum 500kb/s with the previous driver and sometimes it went back to 50B/s and was stopping the download.
Everything seems to be working as it should but my question is the following.

Now iwconfig reports a constant bitrate of 65Mbps but a somewhat scary 200dBm txpower !!!
Yes this is not a typo! Before it was 20(b43) now is 200(wl).
To my knowledge this is over the limit and I'm afraid for even the smallest thing like frying up my wireless card as well as for more health-related stuff...

After googling around I've seen various iwconfig outputs having the same txpower like mine(200) when using wl on different broadcom cards and different distros(ubuntu,debian,fedora)

iwconfig wlp2s0(interface name) txpower 20(or any value) doesn't seem to change anything (I run it as root)

I'm really worried so if you have any explanation for this, a way to see the real txpower or even better revert to open source b43 but make it work as it should I would be grateful.

Last edited by moihack (2014-12-28 13:57:59)

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: Wireless question

I had this same card in my previous laptop.  The b43 module didn't start supporting it until very recently.  So I was stuck using the broadcom-sta (wl) module for a loooong time.  It worked fine and never burned up my card.  You should be fine.  Maybe it is just a bug in the module's code?

As a side note, if you install the broadcom-wl package, you don't need to manually blacklist the other modules.  It is included in the package as /usr/lib/modprobe.d/broadcom-wl.conf.

oldmilk

Member

Registered: 2013-04-12

Posts: 5

Re: Wireless question

Hi, just thought I'd post to say I've also had loads of connection stability problems with this card and the b43 drivers as of late and I couldn't find anything much on google. The driver worked fine initially, maybe even more stable than wl but after a system update a couple of months ago I had problems. Moving back to broadcom-wl resolved everything.