Hi as,
I thanks for the tip. It looks like I need to recompile the drivers from source. Though I am not too faint hearted to do it, but I rather use something that is pre-packaged as I don't want to break my system in the future.
Anyway, a little progress - I managed to hook up the laptop to my cousin's switch via a cable and updated the system using synaptic. After that I blacklisted "bc43" and rebooted. Now the Network Centre sees "BCM 43228" but when I click on it is says something like "interface not found (using driver wl)" - these are not the exact text but something to that effect.
Still waiting for other suggestions before doing the driver compilation.