Wireless networking degraded with Fedora 18

Question

I have an HP laptop with an integrated Broadcom controller:

 02:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller (rev 01)

I recently upgraded to Fedora 18, and have noticed a big difference between wireless networking performance. With Fedora 18 running, and sitting about 10 feet from a Linksys WAP54G access point I get "one bar" on the Gnome icon... if I double the distance, I start losing the connection.

If I reboot to Fedora 17, I get three/four bars at 10feet, etc.

I've checked the internal antenna cables, and made sure that each OS is running the most up to date kernels. I even used a spectrum analyzer to look for noise in the 2.4GHz spectrum. I don't have any external USB WiFi adapters to test with.

Answer 1

Regardless of the number of bars, is the download speed similar or very different under the two versions? (I ask because there was some talk earlier about the number of bars becoming a more accurate assessment --
I don't know if this has been implemented).

Try this (or related sites) to get a reading: https://speakeasy.net/speedtest/

Note that there is, quite naturally, tremendous variability, so you may have to do it a large number of times to get a fair reading under each distribution.

Comments

If all was well with the equipment, I'd expect a much better indication than just one bar at a meagre distance of 10 feet, it doesn't sound like a more accurate reading. It's hard to imagine a transmission/reception
problem with that small distance.

$ uname -rsvp
Linux 3.8.12-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed May 8 15:36:14 UTC 2013 x86_64