Problem with Broadcom BCM43142 wireless driver on 14.04

Question

I have been facing some issues with the wireless drivers on my lenovo Z5070 laptop. Here is the history of the problem

1. After installing 14.04 Wifi was not working. So I followed the below article and installed bcmwl-kernel-source.

Installing Broadcom Wireless Drivers

2. After installing this driver, I am able to connect to Wifi. But the connection drops every now and then. I searched online and found the below article. But the issue in the referred article uses a different wifi chipset.

Drivers for Broadcom BCM43142 on Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr)

Please help me fix this. I installed all the upgrades to check if that fixes the issue. But it didn't help. I also tried disabling the ipv6.

Solution 1

I've been struggling with the same issue with Broadcom BCM43142 on my HP Envy 15 Touchsmart, Ubuntu 14.04. The Wifi card performance deteriorated after an update I did with Software Updater.

I tried purging and reinstalling bcmwl-kernel-source, installing firmware-b43-install and b43-fwcutter in various combinations. Nothing worked.

In the end, I had to downgrade bcmwl-kernel-source to a lower version by doing the following in the terminal:

sudo apt-get remove --purge bcmwl-kernel-source
sudo apt-get install bcmwl-kernel-source=6.30.223.141+bdcom-0ubuntu2
sudo reboot

It's not ideal, but the wifi now works as it did before the update.

Solution 2

I had no wifi after upgrading the kernel. rfkill always showed hard blocked: yes and I was unable to turn it off, not even through BIOS. I tried everything but I finally found the solution that worked immediately.

All you need to do is COVER THE PIN 20 OF THE WIFI PCI-CARD with some tape.

Comments

[Rohit Walavalkar]

did this. got completely screwed. Wifi is not working at all

[Jeremy31]

Reboot, hold shift key during boot until grub menu appears, select Advanced Options for Ubuntu and select a 3.13 kernel. Download the newer version of the driver from packages.ubuntu.com/utopic/bcmwl-kernel-source and see if it works in the 3.18 kernel

[Rohit Walavalkar]

I found that this was happening because of the laptop was far away from the router. Once I moved to the other room in my house there were no issues.