Comment 12 for bug 1097519

I'm astonished at how many duplicates I'm finding of this bug. At its core it goes back about three years, because Ubuntu's not automatically switched to the broadcom-sta-* package for these chipsets, but remained with bcmwl-kernel-source. Eventually bcmwl-kernel-source got bumped to an upstream release that is dangerously incompatible with some older chipsets (perhaps Broadcom's fault), and so all these users got bumped to it.

The core problem of using the wrong package has led to problems such as:

* Failure to build module
* Excessive errors in kernel logs
* Unusable wifi on systems
* Interference with other devices on local WLANs (!)

This even has regressed Precise because Precise 12.04.2 pushed out the 6.20.155.1 version of bcmwl-kernel-source, which has this problem with older chipsets.

For some users, uninstalling bcmwl-kernel-source and installing broadcom-sta-* may fix their problem. And/or, using bcmwl-kernel-source 5.100.82.112 from Quantal may do it. For other chipsets, using the b43* packages may be the solution, but I think that may be a separate bug. I'm currently using bcmwl-kernel-source 5.100.82.112 from Quantal, but broadcom-sta-* in Raring is also 5.100.82.112, so I'm guessing it will also work. However, since broadcom-sta-source is in multiverse, I'm not sure if switching to it is wise, especially for the long term.

This is my best understanding of the problem after going through over 80 bug reports here. An Ubuntu developer could probably understand it better than me.