I bought an Apple iPad 2 wifi at an incredible price as the previous owner has broke the head phone metal plug off in the...

Would replacing the speaker assembly help this problem as the wifi antenna screws into it? I'm not sure if the connection would be interruped because of a malfunctioning speaker (although, the speaker seems to be working fine!).

I had the same problem and finally bought and replaced the ear speaker. I'm not sure what I did to it when replacing the screen but the new piece didn't set me back much and was not incredibly hard to replace.