Hacking WiFi

sechs

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I have a client with a laptop with Broadcom-based wireless that needs to be able to use channels higher than 11 while traveling. In the past, all I've needed to do is hack the driver or firmware to convince it that it was in the Japan or UK. However, I've never done this with a Broadcom chip, and I'm not finding any useful information on this online.

Any insights?
 

Mercutio

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You have to hack the driver? I thought the limitations were in the access points, not the cards.

Both sides have to support the higher number of available channels. Not a problem if the guy is overseas and somebody's using channel 14, but if his card won't switch to channel 14, that's a problem.

One possibility might be to look to see if there's a different driver available on BCM's European web site.
 

sechs

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You have to hack the driver? I thought the limitations were in the access points, not the cards.
Tell that to Intel, which region-locks their WiFi cards in the firmware.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Broadcom posts their drivers on the websites. It looks like I just need to make changes to the drivers, but I have yet to figure out what those changes are.
 

sechs

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I thought of that. The UK and UK driver packages are the same. Japan gets the same driver in a different package.

According to what I've read online, previous versions of the driver actually had a country selection option; but said previous versions don't support this particular chip. The current driver somehow chooses region based on the OS settings, but changing the OS settings doesn't seem to change the driver region.
 
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