Could someone please advise on a WiFi dongle that will work reliably with OSMC and support Ethernet-to-WiFi tethering? I have been reading several posts on the topic, but most of the information seems outdated or conflicting, so I am not really confident on how to proceed.
I know that @DBMandrake has recommended a TP-Link TL-WN823N as a reliable dongle for OSMC. I see it supports host AP mode (at least I think that is what they mean by “SoftAP mode”). But then it seems this device uses the RTL8192cu chipset, and there are posts saying the driver has issues with tethering, so I am not sure.
It seems the 8188cu chipset will work, but I could not find a dongle that uses this one.
rtl8192cu chipset cards do not currently support tethering on OSMC, and that includes the TP-Link TL-WN823N unfortunately, which is otherwise a very good adaptor. (It’s not the adaptors fault - just the linux drivers are lacking)
To be honest Tethering support on OSMC is fairly limited at the moment because connman can only support HostAP mode on wireless drivers that support nl80211 - and many drivers including rtl8192cu do not support nl80211.
You might have better luck using hostapd to enable tethering, but we can’t offer any advice on how you might set that up or whether it would co-exist with connman. (We have not tried it)
Our hands a bit tied - connman only supports nl80211 (which is the modern standard for HostAP mode in Linux drivers) but a number of key wireless drivers still only support obsolete HostAP interfaces. It’s up to the maintainers of those drivers to bring them up to date.
My apologies, but I am still not clear. I understand there are limitations in OSMC (inherited from connman) - that’s OK. I am not married to the TL-WN823N, just need any one that will work given the constraints.
I reviewed the lists corax kindly provided, but do not see an obvious entry for a particular adapter that uses the nl80211 driver. Are you able to provide a recommendation or two (amazon links etc) for devices tested and known to work?
If there’s a demand for it, we could start selling WiFi dongles with supported tethering capabilities. I know some users are after 802.11ac models too, but not sure of the market.
I would certainly welcome an official OSMC dongle that supports tethering (I guess this implies the dongle currently for sale does not?)
Until then, are you able to tell me which dongle(s) worked - surely the team must have used some particular models when developing the tethering functionality?
Just to clarify, was there a typo in the model number you quoted (AC6100)? I could not find a Netgear product matching this, but it seems like you may have meant AC600 (Model: A6100)?