Alfa Network AWUS036AC Long-Range Dual-Band AC1200 Wireless USB 3.0 Wi-Fi Adapter w/2x 5dBi Removable External Antennas for Extreme Distance Connections - 2.4GHz 300Mbps / 5Ghz 867Mbps - USB Cradle Dock Included - Standard's 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11N, 802.11ac

I was looking for a solution to allow me to utilise my parents Virgin Media broadband about 20 meters (crows flight), window to window. This gave me around 30% on 2Ghz and about 30 other routers started displaying my list I’d not seen before. I’ve since had my own VM BB installed, 100MB and on 5GHZ I’m hitting just over 100MB down / 6MB up (limited) all day long no problem. I work with large files, I’m always streaming video in the background and I cannot tell the difference between WIFI / cable. I’ve tested in on Windows 8/10, OSX El Cap, Linux and it’s been no problem. The routed is situated blow my room about 6 meters away with 100%. I can only get 60% on built in WIFI on a laptop. It’s an old house, thick walls so I’m happy. I would recommend this product, it’s well built, the aerials can easily be replaced / upgraded. I’ll defo be taking this when I go away too, hotels always have black spots, this should work a treat! I had also bought a USB3 Amazon cable for it too, which is very well built! http://amzn.to/2a7F3By It’s a really high quality cable, no problems experienced.

I don't normally write reviews on anything, but I felt a strong urge to do so for this product. It's a fantastic product that delivers coverage and speed as if there's no tomorrow, it connects super fast, the driver is fantastic, the bundled software is informant and useful. The product is solid in its construction, no flimsy bits anywhere to be found. Just make sure you install it correctly, having the official driver for this stick is a absolute must, it wont work without it. If you just plug it in without the correct driver, it will recognize the available wifi, but you cannot connect. I suppose it's due to the fact that the router or what have you, cannot identify it properly if your missing the driver. Oh and the antennas are exchangeable, standard mountings.

Excellent design and performance on both 2.4 ghz and 5 ghz bands. I am using this device with two vastly different machines and different operating systems. First machine is a 12-yr old Dell laptop (Latitude D610). I upgraded the memory modules but not the built in b/g wifi card. So the Alfa product appeared ideal. Though the packaging lists support for Linux, it was very far away from a plug-and-play experience. I spent close to two hours hunting for drivers on both the supplied CD and on the Alfa website. I'm using Lubuntu 16.04 and couldn't get the supplied driver to work. However Lubuntu has a generic (I guess chip related driver) that I finally got to work. Performance is fast and strong on the 2.4 ghz band but falters on a 5 Ghz ac signal. Having rolled out prior to the introduction of 802.11n, the Delll doesn't have the horsepower to run ac but was very happy to chug along at unprecedented wifi speeds (for that device) on an 802.11n signal. Now for machine 2, it's an Apple MacBook Pro Retina mid 2014. And on this the Alfa was a screamer! I registered all time records for both down/up including direct ethernet connections - i got over 200 down and 20 up. And best of all, in areas in the house where i previously got fringe or dropping/no wifi on either band, the Alfa delivered virtually full power in the 5 ghz band. I don't know how important the dual external antennas are but i suspect they are able to grab more signal and that they are optimised for beamforming in ac. There is little detail on the Alfa website. All in all, good device, works well on both bands and for a range of machines, but you need patience to get it working (at least for the non-Windows operating systems)

Trying to install drivers in Linux was a struggle, and in the end I gave up. works well with Windows. The extension cable is a good quality and long.

i don't usually write reviews for certain products. But i felt i had to for this. What a great product this is. Totally transformed my computer system. Its got to have made the internet browsing speed 10x faster. Downloads are so fast now its unbelievable. And now my signal strength has improved as well Its so so easy to set up as well. Just pop in the cd and follow on-screen prompts. Hopefully i will never have to buy another wifi adaptor but if i had to it would be one of these.

This device works fairly well, but everything that comes with it is awful. Its chipset is by Realtek, so all the software is Realtek’s. The driver on the CD for Windows 7 is unsigned, so Windows is reluctant to install it. I got a signed driver from Alfa’s web site. Realtek’s configuration utility remains resident in the taskbar. With it there, I either can’t shut down Windows or can’t restart it, sometimes both. More often than not it reports that the USB wireless device is missing or disabled. This USB device is a USB 3 device. The cable supplied, which acts as a stand, is a USB 2 cable. (Can you believe it?) The configuration utility reports that it is running in USB 2 mode. The top speed of USB 2 is not much less that the top speed of the wireless device, but it is less. In the end I uninstalled the Realtek software and used the drivers downloaded from Alfa. I used my own USB 3 cable, and I used Windows to configure the wireless. It’s now working.

Having tried to install this on no less than 5 different desktop PCs with no success at all, I am nearly at the point of packing it up for return to Amazon. Maybe something simple is going wrong but the User Manual is of little help and there is no real support here in the UK either by access to forums or by telephone. 4 of the PCs are Windows 10 and one Windows 7. After installing the software that comes on the included disk and restarting the PC I have had a variety of experiences. On one PC I could see the utility but the utility could not see the device receiving any of the numerous choices of wi-fi connections available although it appeared that the unit was enabled and had a signal of 432Gbs. On the Windows 10 PCs the utility would not run at all. I have downloaded the driver again from the Alpha website to no avail it seems to be the same as that on the disk anyway and dated 2014. On each of the computers I tried it on I was careful to disable the ethernet cable adaptor and try to enable the Realtek wi-fi adaptor. Whether this happened or not (on some PCs it just wouldn't enable) the blue light on the dongle would remain flashing and no connections were reported. The WIndows troubleshooters all report a problem with the wireless driver. Grateful for any ideas please?

Plugged it into a Windows 8 machine. It worked straight away - I like stuff like that. However, word of warning, at least in my case it wasn't until I selected it as the network (e.g. WIFI 2) then select the desired broadband router that it shows a decent signal strength. At first I was really disappointed as I connect to a MIFI device at the top of my house or a BT-With-Fon on my neighbours router I get 5 bars and 3 bars respectively. The Alfa showed 4 and 2 bars - e.g. worse than the built in wifi device. In actual fact, once connected its full bars and excellent signal.