802.11ac Wireless - Solution Found

I’ve stumbled on the perfect companion to my OSMC setup and wanted to share.

The Netgear A6100 (AC600) is Plug n Play and works out of the box which supports:

I’ve yet to test actual throughput but I’ve noticed a performance increase when streaming compared to being hard wired or using a cheap 802.11 n (150mb) NIC, this alone I am calling a success.

TIP This dongle looks quite chunky it’s all plastic, if you de-shell it you have a very small wireless network card :wink:

BUT NOT ALL NETGEAR AC ADDAPTERS IN THIS RANGE WORK!!
In the Black Friday sales, I picked up a Netgear A6210 (AC1200) sadly I’ve had no success in getting this card to work, I’m guessing this card has a different chipset.

Has anybody else had any success with AC Wireless Cards?

Still limited speed even if its AC since the bus host is the throttle

Thanks for the feedback Toast, do you have an preferred way of benchmarking connectivity speeds?

This card/USB dongle is the fastest I’ve come across that is directly supported by OSMC and is faster than using the Ethernet port.

iPerf is a good measurement application

just install it via apt-get and try it out

Looks like I need to do a little more investigating,

on-board NIC (plugged into gig port on router) 7-9 seconds to open the Popular right now option in Youtube
wireless A6100 (connected to AC1300) 2-4 seconds to open the same menu

The network stats paint a different picture contradicting the results above:

on-board NIC 0.0-10.0 sec 109 MBytes 91.4 Mbits/sec
wireless A6100 0.0-10.0 sec 77.9 MBytes 65.1 Mbits/sec

Despite iPerf reporting a slower connection speed youtube and other streaming services are actually faster.

I welcome your thoughts

Your never gonna get AC speeds with a raspberry pi since the USB bus is the bottleneck

Post a dmesg output so that we get better understanding which stick/chipset it is

Sorry, I returned the stick (it was a nice to have impulse buy) I’m happy with the performance of the A6100