[SOLVED] Wireless in Mint 12, is there any logic?

[catalin-ch]

I'm struggling with the laptop wireless in my new Mint 12 installation. In the beginning my wireless card was not installed, it said firmare missing. I went to Additional Drivers in the system settings and it found a proprietary driver for it (Broadcom) which I installed. So far so good. This is where my questions start.

1.The wireless networks seem to appear in no particular order in the list and they cannot be sorted by signal strength or any other criteria like in Windows. Is that normal and can something be done about it?

2. I have 2 networks in my home with 2 different SSIDs which should be the strongest out of all visible networks. One of them is in the 2.4Ghz band (b/g/n) and the other one is in the 5Ghz (n only). Ideally I want to use the 5Ghz one for this laptop. The problem is that the 2.4Ghz one is almost always visible in the list, although not always at the top but the 5Ghz one wasn't visble in the list. After restarting the laptop several times and turning the wifi on and off a few times I was able to see the 5Ghz one in the list and connect to it without any problem but is there any logic to this and what else can be done?

3. Sometimes when I turn on the laptop it doesn't connect to my network automatically and it's trying to connect me to random networks in the list? These may be networks I clicked on accidentally in the past but never connected to them since I didn't have the password, but there seems to be no option to thell the computer to "forget" them like you do in Windows and it's asking me to connect to them over and over again? When it doesn't connect to my network automatically, sometimes I can see it in the list and connect to it directly, some other times it doesn't show in the list and then I go to the Network Settings and I can then select it from the dropdown of previous connections and it connects then but this is annoying, any ideas?

[CptMidnight]

As for problem 2, I don't know if this will help, but 5GHz is more susceptible to interference. It's a straight-up physics problem; the higher the frequency, the worse it gets. You may want to try moving your laptop around the residence to see if you're in a problematic location. Elevating the router away from physical obstructions should also help (it's often tucked under a desk or on the floor).

[catalin-ch]

As for problem 2, I don't know if this will help, but 5GHz is more susceptible to interference. It's a straight-up physics problem; the higher the frequency, the worse it gets. You may want to try moving your laptop around the residence to see if you're in a problematic location. Elevating the router away from physical obstructions should also help (it's often tucked under a desk or on the floor).

I disagree, every article on the net says there is almost no interference on the 5Ghz band as opposed to the 2.4Ghz which is very crowded. I also never had problems with it running Windows on the same machine and I was less than 2m away from the router.

[CptMidnight]

We're talking about two different things. You're talking about frequency congestion. I'm talking about how the signal of a higher frequency doesn't go as far due to how easily it can be "muffled" by physical obstruction.

[catalin-ch]

Ideas anyone?

[catalin-ch]

To everyone interested, it was a wifi driver issue combined with a wifi router issue (router accepts only 3 connected devices, other devices cannot connect unless others are removed). I solved it by installing a new wifi card, the Intel Wifi 5300, and making sure the Linux laptop is one of the 3 devices allowed to connect to the router.