Apart from blacklisting which has the risk of a lockout in case you need to reboot and no ethernet is available, you can also unload the kernel module as follows: sudo modprobe -r -v brcmfmac But I'm not sure unloading the device drivers is a good idea as I fear the wlan0 device may still draw power and even more so if the device drivers' power management features are not loaded, currently I keep drivers loaded and simply make sure the default route via wlan0 is disabled: sudo ip route del default via <Gateway IP> dev wlan0 This will make sure all traffic will go via eth0 and (hopefully) be more stable and so forth for example for the ntp daemon,