The proper way of having the Broadcom driver load at boot using modprobe

In the Broadcom documentation it mentions to put "modprobe wl" in /etc/rc.local. This strikes me as bad form since hardware detection is done every time you boot. Putting the driver loading in rc.local instead of adding it to modprobe makes it so that any service relying on an active connection won't have one during initial boot, but will after rc.local is run thereby having start up drag on even longer (since all those services will now see an active connection and come alive). A better way is to add the following entry to /etc/modprobe.d/network.conf: install wl0 /sbin/modprobe wl Important note: make sure the wl driver loads cleanly when you manually run modprobe wl. If the wl driver stops working chances are that you updated your kernel which means you'll need to "make clean ; make ; make install" the driver followed by insmod'ing it followed by a depmod.