Broadcom4313 random disconnect

**biodojo** · May 26th, 2012

I had an Acer Aspire One 722 with the Atheros Wifi card and it worked fine on 11.04. So we bought 200 of them for our school. However these all came with the Broadcom BCM4313 wireless card and there are issues. It is using the brcmsmac driver and they connect initially. However after a time (sometimes just a few webpages) some of them lose connection. However, they still have an IP and network-manager says they are connected, but no pages load and you can't ping anything on the LAN or internet. A disconnect/reconnect can fix it, but sometimes a restart is required. It happens frequently so is a major issue. Lots of broadcom drivers are blacklisted: bcm43xx, b43, brcm80211. Any ideas or experiences with the broadcom4313 card? Please save these computers from a Windows fate!

**chili555** · May 26th, 2012

Are you certain that brcmsmac is correct for that device? How about we fine tune one of those babies and then you can fix up 199? Please run and post:

Code:

lspci -nn | grep 0280

**biodojo** · May 29th, 2012

Thanks for the reply and offer of help!

Here is the lspci output

07:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller [14e4:4727] (rev 01)

I also tried running tail -f /var/log/syslog on a machine that had an issue:
wpa_supplicant[1029]: Failed to initiate AP scan.
last message repeated 61 times (which repeats every minute)

This message is on both netbooks I have with me that have the issue, and the working ones have very different outputs.

**praseodym** · May 29th, 2012

You need to blacklist the modules bcma and brcmsmac, too, and install the Broadcom-STA driver from "additional drivers". Reboot after that.

**biodojo** · May 29th, 2012

Thanks for the suggestion.
I will try this other driver, though other posts say that the brcmsmac is the one to use and that the STA driver is the bad one

so I guess it might be just try them both and see which one is the most stable on the particular hardware configuration.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne522#Wireless

**chili555** · May 29th, 2012

As much as I respect my esteemed colleague praseodym, I suggest you try brcmsmac first.

**biodojo** · June 13th, 2012

We have 200 new Acer Aspire One 722 with the BCM4313 card. There were major connection problems with 11.04, but upgrading to 12.04 on kernel 3.3 has been more reliable. However, there was an issue where the laptops were connecting and then losing the ability to ping. The issue is intermittent, while trying to track it down I ran tail -f /var/log/syslog and see that every 20 seconds or so this message is displayed.

brcms_ops_bss_info_changed: qos enabled: true (implement)

About every 60 seconds this message is also mixed in:

brcms_c_dotxstatus: Intermediate but not AMPDU

These messages are appearing while the laptop is succefully connected and constantly ping testing (I am getting 97% successful ping returns), so they are aren't error messages per se, but I was wondering if they might be a clue to why there are occasional losses of connectivity. Trouble shooting intermittent issues is tough!