Poor 802.11n performance with BCM4313

Daniel Beer <[email protected]> Tue, 3 Feb 2015 13:51:28 +1300
Newsgroups gmane.org.user-groups.linux.dunedin.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
I have an Acer laptop here with a BCM4313 wireless module:

    03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller (rev 01)
	    Subsystem: Foxconn International, Inc. Device e042
	    Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 17
	    Memory at c0500000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
	    Capabilities: <access denied>
	    Kernel driver in use: brcmsmac

Kernel version is:

    Linux kleene 3.2.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.2.65-1+deb7u1 x86_64 GNU/Linux

...and I'm using the brcmsmac driver with the most recent firmware I
could find (from late last year, I think).

The problem is that when I enable 802.11n on the access point (an
Orcon-supplied Netcomm DSL router), the performance is so bad that it's
unusable. Ping times over the local network regularly exceed 500ms, with
at least 5% packet loss. If I start to download anything, the connection
will silently die after a couple of minutes. I'm not having problems
with any other machine on the network -- it's just this one in
particular.

I've discovered that if I disable 802.11n on the access point, then the
performance is fine. I still get the occasional long ping, but the
connection is very reliable and usable.

So, I have a workaround for now, but it'd be nice if I could still use
802.11n and get faster local data transfer. Has anybody encountered this
before? Any ideas?

Cheers,
Daniel

-- 
Daniel Beer <[email protected]> http://dlbeer.co.nz/
PGP: BA6E 0B26 1F89 246C E3F3  C910 1E58 C43A 160A 553B

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