I was looking on amazon and noticed these WiFi usb sticks. They boast high speeds for low costs, so I was wondering if they actually have $30 high speed WiFi with no additional cost or simply provide a faster connection to my previously existing WiFi.
In: Technology
They are intended to be discrete and cheap for people who need to get online and perhaps don’t have the ability to deal with large dangling antennas where they intend to use them. For example some motherboards have USB connectors right on them and can accept small lightweight devices semi-permanently plugged into them. Put this in and your PC has WiFi like it’s a laptop.
Of course, the antenna thing will be the downside. Good wifi devices have multiple antennas at a sizeable distance from each other to assist in signal quality. A tiny USB dongle isn’t going to have that and will certainly not perform as well as something with multiple antennas built-in or attached externally. Eg: laptops often have the WiFi card in the keyboard half, but at least one antenna inside the display half.
The speeds they boast will most likely be the WiFi standard speeds for what they support (2.4 vs 5 GHz, 802.11ac etc) or the optimal speeds they can get. If you already have WiFi, stick with it. If not, slow wifi is better than no wifi, right?
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