My laptop has a Broadcom 4311 rev 01 wireless chipset. The drivers from the latest Linux git releases are vastly superior to the old bcm43xx driver... so as of yesterday, I'm back to running the latest wireless-2.6 code. The former upstream maintainer claims that he gets better throughput with the reverse-engineered Linux driver than he does on Windows XP. While I was at it, I compiled in dynamic tick (tickless) support....
My conference tradition is to occupy myself with activities completely unrelated to the main topic. For instance, at DebConf I hacked on GNOME stuff, at GUADEC I hacked on Debian stuff, and at LinuxConf.eu I did very little. At PyCon UK, I've built the wireless-dev tree of Linux, and got the new b43 driver to run. So, it works. It appears to have increased the transmission power of the card, and limits the bit rate properly, so should work at longer ranges without fiddling about....
This weekend, I'm at the annual Debian BBQ in Cambridge, and it's very nice weather. All the cool people are sitting outside with their laptops, a good 10-20 meters from the indoor wireless access point, happily using the internet. The problem is, by default, my wireless card just doesn't work at that range. So, today I had a look at the Broadcom bcm43xx driver code, to see what was going on....