Recommendation for WiFi adapter
Recommendation for WiFi adapter
Hello All,
I'm using a Thinkpad 430S with a 1Gbps internet plan. The laptop's internal WiFi LAN card is capped at around 150Mbps, which is slowing me down. I was told that a USB WiFi 6 adapter could help. I looked up a product and found this one...
https://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-Nano...pr...sb,aps,140&sr=8-1
Would this be suitable? Are there better brands I should consider?
TIA
A number of things.
First why do you need more than 150mbps. That is a very old laptop and does not even have enough disk space to load a lot of data. The common example people have for wanting very high download rates are for big games like microsoft flight simulator. The new version is much less but I still see people talking about over 10gbyte of download size which is more than your laptop has.
Next wifi6 turns out to be a waste of money it is not any faster than wifi5 for most people. The unit you link has the same issue a huge number do. It only supports 80mhz radio channels. The key thing that makes wifi6 faster is the 160mhz radio channels. There are a large number of technical issues why a lot of devices do not support 160mhz.
Even if you were to find a wifi7 USB stick those tiny devices are you very worst option. They are designed to favor portability and low power usage over performance. The antenna are very small and the output power is very low.
SO
If you still feel you need more bandwidth I would either go with wifi5 or wifi6e. You of course need a router that also supports these. Wifi5 mostly because it performs the same as wifi6 for less cost. If you feel you really need speeds say in the 600mbps+ range wifi6e running on 6ghz is your best option.
For which adapter the best ones are physically larger and tend to come with USB extension cables. It all depends on how much you are willing to trade portability issues for performance.
Your other option is to replace the internal wifi card. This solves the physical size and issue of carrying around extra stuff. It is a older laptop that uses the older mini half height pcie cards rather than the newer m.2. I strongly suspect you will not find wifi6e cards but there are a number of wifi5 cards. There are a number of youtube videos that show the replacement procedure for your laptop so you can watch those first to decide if you are willing to try.