802.11ac Wireless - Solution Found

Help and Support Raspberry Pi
1

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:

netgearAC.JPG290×525 27.1 KB

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?

2

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

3

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.

4

iPerf is a good measurement application

just install it via apt-get and try it out

5

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

6

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

7

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

8

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