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I have a recently bought hp pavilion dm1 with Ubuntu 11.10 installed. It is able to detect my personal wireless network when in close proximity to the router, however it fails to do so when I'm in a different room (unless I connected previously), let alone at my university. Any thoughts?

output of sudo lshw -c network:

       description: Wireless interface
       product: BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller
       vendor: Broadcom Corporation
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0
       logical name: wlan0
       version: 01
       serial: 60:d8:19:74:73:6b
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless
       configuration: broadcast=yes driver=brcmsmac driverversion=3.0.0-13-generic-pae firmware=N/A ip= latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn
       resources: irq:16 memory:f0200000-f0203fff
       description: Ethernet interface
       product: RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller
       vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:07:00.0
       logical name: eth0
       version: 06
       serial: 10:1f:74:b7:42:d7
       size: 10Mbit/s
       capacity: 1Gbit/s
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       resources: irq:41 ioport:2000(size=256) memory:f0104000-f0104fff memory:f0100000-f0103fff

output of iwconfig wlan0:

wlan0     IEEE 802.11bgn  ESSID:"my_wireless"  
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.437 GHz  Access Point: 00:16:0A:0F:8A:46   
          Bit Rate=11 Mb/s   Tx-Power=19 dBm   
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=47/70  Signal level=-63 dBm  
          Tx excessive retries:10  Invalid misc:82   Missed beacon:0
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possible duplicate of Broadcom 4313 Signal strength very low on an HP Pavilion dv4 –  fossfreedom Dec 12 '11 at 20:31
the solution in that linked question was to install the older 2.6.39 kernel... –  fossfreedom Dec 12 '11 at 20:31
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1 Answer

Had the same problem with the same card BCM4313. You don't use the proper driver (brcmsmac), the proper driver is wl.

Install the proprietary one from Broadcom.

Then blacklist in /etc/modprob.d/blacklist.conf

blacklist bcm43xx  
blacklist brcmsmac  
blacklist bcma   
blacklist b43    
blacklist ssb

Restart and check that:

lspci -k | grep  wl

Hope it works for you like for me (very strong signal).

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