The chipset was the same Broadcom 4313. despite being from a different computor an old Acer. Fortunate coincidence. Interesting though was the fact that the electronic connectors ( tabs which go into the computor side dont know what they are called ) were not identical in allignment between the two cards but the "new" card works even better than the old one. Wonder what hidden twists this will throw up
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Even better
inxi -Fxz gave me a more detailed snapshot picture of the whole system in an organised manner.
Good, it's using "wl" as driver as it should. 
I know but I didn't feel the need to know your whole system. 
Ditto ! hence the Screenshot edit 
. I felt another newbie stumbling upon this thread could benefit from that options set of $: inxi -Fxz. It gives a lot of detailed information on hardware like , Name , driver, manufacturer, mac address , status = up/down , IF wlp18s0 identity/coordinates of the card which i think describes the bus and serial lines on which the card is probably transmitting information, thought that was important if one wanted to probe other sources of malfunction using the address of the card
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I don't know what others think, but this emoji at the end of the above quote appears to me like it's "flipping someone the double bird!" and laughing about it ; unintended of course.
Thanks @hippytaff for the tips
Actually the beta versions of Elive includes a very good automated tool to make these drivers working, can you confirm that the drivers doesn't directly works by default in a recent beta version? 
because if they don't, could be needed to improve the tool with the missing things
The tool can be called manually like this and some debug information will be shown to know what it does:
~ ❯❯❯ sudo EL_DEBUG=3 b43-driver-fixes
D: [ /usr/sbin/b43-driver-fixes +232 ] no b43 devices found, ignoring...
in my case, no B43 hardware was detected
Sorry @Thanatermesis, the laptop I used with this chipset is no longer working, well it does work afaik, but I’ve lost the charger 
so I am unable to test this for you at the moment.
well, could be good if people with this card can betatest it 
i never found a machine with this kind of chipsets lol, and even worse, every model requires a different drivers setup
the good thing of that tool is that it doesn't do a specific configuration for each model, but it simply loops between all the possible ways to configure it (trying each driver), and saving the conf for the one that worked, but of course... it needs to be betatested a bit more
Clearly the tool works well on the [not broken] card @IamElive inserted into his machine as a replacement, rest assured.
The probe says it's indeed a BCM4313 and it uses the wl module as it should.
I was actually rightly surprised by the claim that the BCM4313 wasn't working considering how old the card is.
In the future anyone complaining about a Broadcom card can be advised to check the hardware itself, as a first. 
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I totally agree. What threw me for a loop was that the wifi card continued to work weakly if i was close to router and even when it finally stopped getting transmitting or receiving internet signals , most of the hardware and driver detection/troubleshooting tools were flagging it as functioning well. Only traceroute , ping and other network /packet transmission tools were able to show that information was not moving through the network but i could not find the blockage.
I concur that a card this old though proprietory has been linux optimised to its maximum in terms of driver efficiency that it would be a fools errand to try to override the hardware automated choices. Mea culpa
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I’ve been out of the game for a while and so I was surprised when I saw this post and that people were still fighting bcm chipsets. It was the Bain of my life for ages, but learned quite a bit about wireless chipsets along the way. Mostly forgotten now unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on which way you look at it.
Often good to keep guys like you around. Living libraries of forgotten technology. Just like the scientist still working on the voyager deep space probes. Otherwise science loses that information like was lost on the apollo Moon missions coz no ones still around that knows how to work the tools on which the massive information obtained was stored or how else to retrieve it.
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