[SOLVED] Slow wireless connection ?

kikinovak · 02-21-2013, 06:40 PM

Hi,

I just bought an HP Pavilion DM1, a nice little machine halfway between netbook and ultrabook. Windows Seven is already wiped from the disk, and Slackware64 + Xfce is running on it.

Wireless sort of works, but it looks like bandwidth peaks at about half of what it should be. Normally the connection here is 1 Mbit/s, but I only get half of that, according to Conky's status monitor.

The wireless card is a Broadcom BCM4313. I've googled a bit, and this card seems to give quite some headaches. But for ten folks posting about this piece of hardware, there seem to be as many opinions on how to configure that card correctly. Too much information there. Don't know if I'm missing something, though.

Any suggestions?

Niki

guanx · 02-22-2013, 12:04 PM

Is the 1M-bit/s the speed of your WAN or your WLAN?

If it's your WLAN speed, then you *should* get half of that for data throughput because of the high overhead of wireless connection.

Arcosanti · 02-24-2013, 04:44 PM

I used to have that problem with my bcm 4306 when using the b43 module under kernels before 2.6.38.3. The solution was to either upgrade the kernel to something after 2.6.38.3 (2.6.38.3 had some issues) or use ndiswrapper with a windows driver. If you are using a kernel from the 3.x series then I won't be able to advise you as I haven't tried those yet. Do let us know which version of Slackware and kernel you are using. Also which wifi module too.

kikinovak · 02-26-2013, 10:10 AM

OK, I spent a few hours experimenting with this, and now I have everything working perfectly.

When using the free Broadcom wireless driver included in the kernel (brcmsmac), I only get poor signal and connectivity: something like below 60/100 when I'm right next to my wireless access point, and 0/100 when I move the laptop to the next room.

The best solution is to blacklist this driver as well as the legacy br43xx drivers and build the Broadcom STA drivers. I started writing a SlackBuild for these... only to find out later that SlackBuilds.org already has them:

http://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.../broadcom-sta/

These 'wl' drivers work great, signal and connection quality are now both 100/100.