bcm43xx cannot hit 54Mbps, and drops connection

TonyBryan · 01-30-2007, 05:18 AM

Hi all,

Linux

, but I got my bcm43xx card running on FC6xen with wpa_supplicant - haha! I could have wept when it connected to the AP.

I did

however when I found that:

I can only configure the card to support 11Mbps, not the 54Mbps that it should support (or even 108Mbps).
The connection is dropped frequently, and I have to deactivate-activate the device
I can't get a connection established on boot. I have to manually restart wpa_supplicant and then start the device.

Can anyone help, particularly with the speed issue. It looks like it thinks the card is an 11b device, not 11g.

Thanks!

beagle2 · 01-30-2007, 07:43 AM

Which chip do you have? http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/?go=devices shows status of supported devices

cathectic · 01-30-2007, 07:47 AM

1. bcm43xx does not yet support anything above 11MBps - this is hard wired into the driver.

2. Depending on the card model. BCM4318, BCM4311 and BCM4312 (I think) are not properly supported by this driver due to transmission problems (e.g. you can receive with them, but bcm43xx is very hit and miss as to whether these cards can transmit). If you have one of these chipsets, you should try ndiswrapper.

3. You need to run "ifconfig <wireless device> up" before running wpa_supplicant - this loads the firmware onto the BCM43xx chip and turns it on.

rje_NC · 01-30-2007, 08:09 PM

I have a Broadcom 4306 wireless card on my Compaq Presario 2100. I gave up trying to use the bcm43xx driver. I use the current version of ndiswrapper that has worked perfectly under Slackware and Dropline Gnome. I recompiled the 2.6 17.13 kernel to set the 8K stack size and have had zero problems with ndiswrapper at or near 54Mbps.

Bob

TonyBryan · 01-31-2007, 04:12 AM

Okay, so I'm on 4318 chipset, which is unstable. Nice. Could explain a few things. Thanks Beagle2.

Cathetic - thanks for that. In all the HowTo's that I read I didn't find one reference to a max transmission speed! If I'd have known I'd have gone straight for ndiswrapper.

rje_nc - I ran into the 4K stack issue first time round, and was one of the 'scary' things that made me jump onto bcm43xx. Can you point me to a good how to on actually recompiling for the 8k stack?