Any advice regarding external wireless adapters?

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Number703

Any advice regarding external wireless adapters?

Post by Number703 »

I currently have a Ralink rt5390 wireless card, Ubuntu and Mint have had issues with it for some time now, I originally switched from Ubuntu to Mint because it used to work better in Mint but now it doesn't work in either. Went back to Ubuntu and upgraded hoping that would fix it, nope, and after looking around it seems like there's no real way to fix it. So, next option is an external wireless adapter. Anybody have any suggestions for which one to get that work well with Mint/Ubuntu (especially not too expensive)? Preferably one small enough that I could just leave it in all the time, but I do need enough range to do ~25 feet through two walls. What sort of specs should I be looking for? Ethernet gives me >50mbps, and in Windows I get about 35Mbps over wireless. I'd like to be able to still get at least 20mbps. I noticed the cheaper adapters typically say "up to 150mbps." I know the "up to" part can sometimes be a lot of fluff, are these going to be fast enough or do I need to look for faster ones? What about range, what would I look for to find an adapter powerful enough to go 25-30 feet through two walls? And are there any red flags I should look for to check if it's not Linux/Mint compatible? Thanks for any help, and if you have any suggestions for a specific adapter I'd appreciate it!
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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gtsfer

Re: Any advice regarding external wireless adapters?

Post by gtsfer »

I have a Belkin F7D2102 N300 Micro Wireless N USB Adapter. This one works out of the box on LM, no drivers to install. Plug it in and go. It's less than $20 on Amazon, it's really small with surprising range. I can see wifi from 6 to 8 of the neighbors. Some of these are at least 150' away.
Number703

Re: Any advice regarding external wireless adapters?

Post by Number703 »

Looks good, but what do you use it for? The Amazon page just says it's good for stuff like email and messaging, the N600 is what the company recommends for video streaming apparently. Can I watch Hulu on this or would I need to get a better one? It looks like all the better-models are the full-length USB drives... not sure why they couldn't at least turn it sideways so I don't have 2.5" sticking out of the side of my laptop :/
gtsfer

Re: Any advice regarding external wireless adapters?

Post by gtsfer »

I use it on an old laptop sometimes and I've never had an issue with it. It does everything just fine including video streaming, Hulu or whatever. Besides, your ISP is most likely only giving you something like 25 MBPS. Unless you're in a Google fiber experimental area. Most any wifi adapter goes way faster than that. So does my ethernet network card on my desktop for that matter.

You can for the heck of it test your connection speeds here. http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ http://www.bandwidthplace.com/
(mine are about ~ 29mbps down, 6mbps upload)

More important is your actual connection / signal strength on wifi. If it's lousy you'll get a lot of dropped packets and then they're retransmitted to make up for bad data. It couldn't hurt to spring for the N600 for sure. But in some ways Amazon is lying to you to make a few extra bucks.
gtsfer

Re: Any advice regarding external wireless adapters?

Post by gtsfer »

In fact, I'll go one step further. It's a flat out lie to say that any 150MB wifi adapter is only good for email and messaging. It's a marketing ploy, period. I'm just sayin'. :lol:
Number703

Re: Any advice regarding external wireless adapters?

Post by Number703 »

Okay, I just wasn't sure which part of it was a marketing ploy, I wasn't sure if they were just being liberal with the "up to" 300mbps claim. I ordered it, estimated delivery is Tuesday so hopefully I'll have WiFi next week. Thanks for the help!
AlbertP
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Re: Any advice regarding external wireless adapters?

Post by AlbertP »

When wifi reception is good I can reach up to 17Mbps actual speed with a 54Mbps adapter; this way a 150Mbps adapter should certainly be able to reach 20Mbps or higher if the reception is good enough.

Should you want a better wifi adapter, TP-Link has a dual band 300Mbps adapter which works with Mint 16, the TL-WDN3200. And it isn't very expensive. However it is quite a large dongle.

What may be even cheaper than a 300Mbps, is replacing the internal wifi card of your computer by an Intel one. In many laptops it is easy to replace. Most laptops accept third-party internal wifi cards, but using these is not possible in laptops by HP/Compaq, Lenovo/IBM (and Dell?). Since you have a Ralink RT5390 inside your computer. Those laptops will not boot if an internal wifi card is placed which didn't come from the laptop manufacturer.
The Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 by Intel, is available for about €25 in my country.
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