BCM4360 Driver Troubleshooting
Recently, I decided to set up dual boot on my computer since I had two 1 TB SSD’s, and as I dont play many games nowadays like I used to, the space was sitting there waiting to be used. Plus, seeing all the fancy Arch + Hyprland rices got me intrigued.
Setting up Arch Linux itself was relatively straight forward, in comparison to what I’d heard about how “difficult” it was to install. Going through the official documentation and following along made it extremely trivial.
I had used USB tethering as my source of internet for the installation process, and everything worked as anticipated. Or so I thought.
The NIC card I currently use is a Archer T4E | AC1200 PCIe Adapter. Unfortunately, it’s drivers werent supported on Linux. It does however have an alternative, according to the Linux Wireless Documentation.
You can verify which PCI-ID your NIC card corellates to by running:
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lspci -nnk
# or
lspci -vnn -d 14e4
Mine was listed as 14e4:43a0, so according to the documentation, it lists it as not supported, but however, it does have an alternative, that being wl
So I installed it using:
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sudo pacman -S broadcom-wl
sudo modprobe wl
And with a quick reboot, it was working! But here’s where I ran into the second issue.
It could work for 15 minutes to an hour without any issues, but then suddenly disconnect for a minute or so before reconnecting. This was especially annoying when downloading something relatively large, as this caused the disconnections to occur way more frequently.
I tried going through all documentation, google results, forums, etc, but only one thing slightly stood out, and that was this post from a user with the same PCI-ID as mine.
They mentioned the solution being with the 5 GHz channel they were on. But lucky me, the AT&T modem/router(BGW320) I have doesn’t have an option to manually change the channel. So I, once again, was stuck with my disconnecting Wi-Fi connection.
So as a last attempt, I figured I’d try lowering the bandwidth from 80 MHz to 40 MHz, just to see if that’d have a similar effect, and it did! It seemed to have fixed it, although obviously going down in MHz when I’m already relatively close to my router isnt the most pleasing solution, it’ll have to do.