The gamepad includes a Broadcom BCM4319 wifi card for network communications.

It is accessed over SDIO.

The driver used in the stock gamepad firmware is a port of open-source BCM43xx drivers.

The BCM4319's firmware is loaded from Flash upon boot.

So far, the following peculiarities have been observed with this firmware:

• It only supports the 5GHz band, despite the fact the BCM4319 supports both bands
• It can't connect to 802.11ac networks
• It has a custom WPA implementation. It doesn't support standard WPA.

Non-Nintendo BCM4319 firmwares can be found online, and function to some extent. They're the opposite of the Nintendo firmware in that they only support the 2.4GHz band. They perform very poorly on this band, not known why.