I’m resurrecting a closed thread from 2013. It is related to post on slow wifi that I searched already.
I have an old laptop that is suitable to my needs except for an extremely slow wifi connection. The laptop card is not the problem. It dual boots Tumbleweed and Windows 10. The Windows boot downloads at 15-20x the speeds of Tumbleweed. Here are the details:
All the posts I find everywhere are old; more than 5 years. They give conflicting advice. Yast has B43 Legacy driver and bcm43xx firmware. In the old posts, both are said to give problems. However, some of those people were upgrading to linux kernel 4.0. I’m guessing things have changed. On a whim, I booted to Linux Mint 19.3 from the dvd drive. I then checked download speeds from several websites; first on Tumbleweed then on Mint running from the dvd drive. Here are the results.
Tumbleweed
0.57 MB
1.2 MB
1.0 MB
0.78 MB
1.3 MB
Then, I went to most of those same sites and got these results using Mint on the same laptop.
Mint 19.3 (in dvd Drive)
12.6 MB
20 MB
21 MB
12.5 MB
One issue that gives me pause is the two files I mentioned above list 4311, 4312, 4321 but not 4313. Any advice?
The Linux kernel comes with the brcm80211 driver by default. This driver supports bcm4313, bcm43224, bcm43224, bcm43225, bcm4329, bcm4330, bcm4334, bcm43241, bcm43235 (>= rev 3), bcm43236 (>= rev 3), bcm43238 (>= rev 3), bcm43143, bcm43242.
If you experience problems with the above driver, and you have one of the following chipsets: bcm4312, bcm4313, bcm4321, bcm4322, bcm43224, bcm43225, bcm43227, bcm43228, you may want to try installing the proprietary broadcom-wl driver (package: broadcom-wl) available in the Packman software repository.
Mark this thread solved! Thanks for the instructions. I downloaded only the broadcom-wl, not the firmware, since I was doing one step at a time. After reboot, it switched to that driver. I ran only the ookla speed test because when that came in at 16.7MB, I saw it was fixed. For the first time, I was able to attend a Zoom meeting using that laptop.
Yes, external firmware is not required as incorporated with proprietary driver AFAIU.
After reboot, it switched to that driver. I ran only the ookla speed test because when that came in at 16.7MB, I saw it was fixed. For the first time, I was able to attend a Zoom meeting using that laptop.
