Thank you for replying.
As you can see from the first line of my post, I'm running -release, and
not -current, and I don't plan to run -current since I'm very happy with
an upgrade twice a year for the moment.
Actually, since the link you provided was from end october, I tried
installing it but the nic does not come up at all.
On my machine I had previously installed iwn-firmware-5.1, now I have
iwn-firmware-5.1p0, but the situation is exactly as per my first post.
So, why does 'ping' hang there and does not give 'packet loss' error, as
it did until two days ago?