[arch-general] b43: wireless issues

[Sergey Manucharian]

Hi Magnus,

Excerpts from Magnus Therning's message of Fri, 18 Jun 2010 00:22 +0100:

> It's a broadcom card, using the b43 driver.  It connects fine on
> login, but once I actually use the network I'm disconnected and all
> attempts to re-connect fail.
> 
> ....
> One person mentioned that things started working much better if he
> limited the network to 802.11b (not g), but I haven't seen any obvious
> way of achieving this.  Any hints on what I can do to test that
> myself?

I used to use b43, but now I don't. I had similar situations with other
wifi cards.

1. Two or more access points in the vicinity are using the same
channel. If you're able to change the channel, chose one not used by
others. The reasons are more or less obvious.

2. If other computers are using the same access point, and my
connection is getting dropped I indeed intentionally lower the bitrate:

iwconfig wlan0 bitrate 24M

(or lower) - it works, but the reason is unknown, I haven't
investigated it.

You may want to install wavemon program to monitor your connection
[0], there is a package in AUR too [1].

Cheers,
Sergey

[0] http://eden-feed.erg.abdn.ac.uk/wavemon/

[1] http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/wavemon/wavemon/PKGBUILD