# bwi wireless driver weak/short range



## lockdoc (May 23, 2011)

Hi FreeBSD friends,

I have been using my Broadcom BCM4311 802.11b/g inside a Dell Latitude D420 for a long time. Unfortunately is the range really short compared when I use it in windows.

I currently run the bwi(4) driver and firmware. As can be seen from my dmesg it seems to have a couple of problems (*Line 6:* invalid antenne gain for example)


```
bwi0: <Broadcom BCM4311 802.11b/g Wireless Lan> mem 0xdfdfc000-0xdfdfffff irq 17 at device 0.0 on pci12
bwi0: BBP: id 0x4311, rev 0x1, pkg 0
bwi0: MAC: rev 10
bwi0: PHY: type 2, rev 8, ver 4
bwi0: RF: manu 0x17f, type 0x2050, rev 2
bwi0: invalid antenna gain in sprom
bwi0: firmware rev 0x0127, patch level 0x000e
bwi0: need multicast update callback
bwi0: need multicast update callback
bwi0: need multicast update callback
bwi0: bwi_intr: intr PHY TX error
bwi0: bwi_restart begin, help!
bwi0: firmware rev 0x0127, patch level 0x000e
bwi0: bwi_intr: intr PHY TX error
bwi0: bwi_restart begin, help!
bwi0: firmware rev 0x0127, patch level 0x000e
bwi0: bwi_intr: intr PHY TX error
bwi0: bwi_restart begin, help!
bwi0: firmware rev 0x0127, patch level 0x000e
bwi0: bwi_intr: intr PHY TX error
bwi0: bwi_restart begin, help!
bwi0: firmware rev 0x0127, patch level 0x000e
bwi0: need multicast update callback
bwi0: need multicast update callback
bwi0: bwi_intr: intr PHY TX error
bwi0: bwi_restart begin, help!
bwi0: firmware rev 0x0127, patch level 0x000e
bwi0: bwi_intr: intr PHY TX error
bwi0: bwi_restart begin, help!
...
and it goes on with this
```


I then discovered the bwn(4) driver and firmware in the ports and in fact the range is far better, unfortunately seems the bwn(4) driver/firmware broken, as the packet loss will go up to 100% after some minutes of use.


a) How can I solve the range problem with the bwi(4) driver?
b) Anybody here who got the bwn(4) driver working without packet loss (as I was seeing some other posts about the bwn(4) driver having packet loss here in the forum)?


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