Qualcomm buys Atheros - good luck with that

By Steven Rosenberg on January 5, 2011 5:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) |

This is an Atheros 5424 module. My Lenovo G555 has TWO Atheros modules stuffed inside of it, but not this exact one. I've been chuckling. Inside. Silently. OK, not so silently.

Never mind that little show called CES. The big tech news today is Qualcomm's $3.2 billion (with a b) acquisition of WiFi chip maker Atheros.

Ostensibly Qualcomm couldn't develop its own WiFi business and thus threw a few billion at the problem.

So what does this matter to me?

Well, I happen to have a laptop with not one but TWO Atheros networking chips. Yes, my Lenovo G555 (an el-cheapo choice at $329 new, out the door from Fry's) has Atheros chips for both 802.11g WiFi and 10/100 Mbps wired Ethernet.

For the record, here's the output of lspci in Linux for the G555 relevant to networking chips:

08:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)
09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications AR8132 Fast Ethernet (rev c0)

I guess it's better than having Broadcom wireless, and truthfully it's not the Atheros wireless chip that's my problem. That pretty much "just works" in Windows 7, Linux, OpenBSD and FreeBSD.

No, it's the Atheros Ethernet module that's flaky. Never mind that Lenovo really cheaped out (OK, it's a cheap laptop, but come on already) by using the 10/100 Mbps Atheros instead of the probably not-that-much-more-expensive 10/100/1000 Mbps version, but this thing just isn't ready for prime time.

Some "older" Linux distributions don't even recognize it. And it's not that new, I understand. In both OpenBSD and FreeBSD I have to "conjure" it to life by setting the media type. Otherwise it stays dark.

And in any OS, every once in awhile the Ethernet simply stops working entirely. Windows, Linux — it doesn't matter. It just dies. I pull the battery from the laptop, open up the HUGE memory door, which exposes about half the laptop's bottom to the world, then put everything back together, and the whole thing works again.

Annoying.

If you care to read every mention I've made about Atheros chips, this handy Google search will take you there.