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I'm running Ubuntu 16.04 and between when I shut down last Friday and booted up today my laptop's wireless card can no longer connect to my router unless I'm standing next to it.

The wireless card is a Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11bgn Wireless Network Adapter [14e4:4727] (rev 01)

The current driver is brcmsmac Changing to b43 or sbb makes no noticeable difference.

I followed this question in particular extensively: Installing Broadcom Wireless Drivers

This suggests I need to use bcmwl-kernel-source for this wireless card which changes the driver to wl0 and blacklists bcma however it is still very weak.

I then tried the other suggestions there, eg. b43-firmware-installer, but it didn't make any difference. Other suggestions were to blacklist certain modules but I found none made a difference. A difference between my problem and most people with this issue is that the wifi is working, it just has weak signal, most people I've read with issues with this card cannot get it to work at all.

I have been using Ubuntu on this laptop for quite a few years and never had this problem before, I've been running 16.04 in particular for a few months now and it is only since the weekend this problem happened. If I put the Ubunutu live usb in (where I installed it from) it also has this problem now whereas I used the wifi through that to install it previously.

Other things to note are the windows partition has no wifi problems and I'm connecting to eduroam if that makes a difference. The laptop is a Toshiba L650.

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badsnakecharmer
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    Possible duplicate of Installing Broadcom Wireless Drivers – user535733 Feb 27 '17 at 17:51
  • I linked that in the original question as is why I tried changing the driver, I've been working through that and similar threads all day. I think the difference is there it wasn't working at all, here it's just very weak. – badsnakecharmer Feb 27 '17 at 18:17
  • I have been using Ubuntu with this laptop and wireless card since 2013 and using Ubuntu 16.04 with it since December so I have managed to get it working before. It does still work but only when I go close to the router and it was working until before today. I spent about 6 hours today trying different things and used that thread extensively before I posted so I have tried many known solutions. – badsnakecharmer Feb 27 '17 at 21:31
  • That's important to know! It prevents many blind alleys and erroneous markings as a duplicate question. Please edit your question to explain what you tried, and how 55868 doesn't apply. – user535733 Feb 28 '17 at 03:04
  • I hope it's more clear now. I tried using an old Realtek wireless card this morning, this found wifi with strong signal but took forever to connect, if it did connect it would drop after a few minutes so I've gone back to the Broadcom one now. – badsnakecharmer Feb 28 '17 at 11:30
  • Reviewers: this isn't a dupe - the cause was elsewhere. I'm voting to leave open, but no-repro would be a reasonable close-reason I think – Zanna Mar 07 '17 at 09:29

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So this got resolved, it was a problem with eduroam. I reported it to the university yesterday and they power cycled the access point just there and the signal returned.

The signal also boosted on my netbook also running Ubuntu 16.04 with an Intel N6320 wireless card. So I'm not sure what happened the router that didn't affect Android or Windows but did affect Ubuntu. I should have tried another Linux distribution just as a test.

I work in a university and have never experienced this with eduroam in the past but if it does happen again I'll know to check eduroam first and maybe test some other distros to see if it's a Ubuntu thing.

badsnakecharmer
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