Last month I reported on the installation of a TP-Link TL-WN751ND wireless adapter in my mongrel 12.04 workshop setup. There's no doubt that it was a serviceable if not perfect solution to my telephone installation problems. Although I continued to experience the connection drop-outs during the period they were less frequent than with my Belkin dongle and, in defence of the card, it has provided (significantly) faster speeds.
Now that I've got my own broadband, I've had a few days to test the card on a dedicated network. Since the installation of my service, the card hasn't dropped the connection at all, so my problems on the public network were probably related to signal strength and user activity (that is, the network, not detecting any user activity, dropped the connection automatically) issues. Surprisingly, the reported speed on the private network has dropped to 65Mb/s. I say surprisingly because the wireless AP is directly above the antenna, separated from the PC by only a wooden desktop.
Nonetheless, I've decided to leave the PC on a wireless connection for now. Sure, it's probably not as fast as a physical Ethernet connection, but it is reliable and it saves using up a port on the router. If you buy sensibly (which I did not), this card offers a reliable wireless connection and I find myself recommending its use on Ubuntu machines.
Sources & References:
- TP Link: TL-WN751ND
