ASUS Wireless-N USB Adapter USB-N13 300Mbps

I bought this wireless adapter to connect to my Western Digital TV Live Plus media streamer. It connected immediately with a 96% signal strength (as indicated by WD’s built in signal strength indicator). My wireless router is a room and two walls away–approximately 12-14 feet by distance–so I expected a solid signal, but not quite 96%. I can stream 8GB 1080p .MKV BlueRay rips from my DNS-321 NAS without any hiccups, something I could not do with an older Linksys adapter that I was using before.

I have another of these adapters that I use for an older notebook that doesn’t have N-band, and I get extremely fast transfers using it, and 0 dropped connections. In my opinion, Asus has really produced some excellent wireless networking gear, including their routers that all support DDT WRT and some Tomato USB firmware–all of which allow you to take the fullest advantage of your hardware and get rock solid reliability, transfer speed, and additional features that many competitors don’t. I’ve been really impressed with all of my Asus networking gear, enough so to replace my Lynksis WRT110 router with an ASUS RT-N16 W.

Another thing worth mentioning is that this adapter comes with a short, stiff USB extender which functions like an antenna and allows you to aim the adapter in a certain direction. This is especially handy for applications like mine where I am connecting it to a device in a media cabinet and want the adapter to get the clearest signal possible.

Conclusions:

This is a great adapter for both G or N band. It doesn’t support 5GHhz, but 5Ghz is overrated except for a few particular applications.

Some additional thoughts on networking and reviews:

There are many who write reviews about consumer networking gear and give products low marks when they don’t know anything about how to properly lay out a network (wired or wireless) and who blame their mistakes on the hardware. The bottom line is that while consumer networking has gotten much simpler over the years, 95% of the problems people encounter have to do with their failure to set up their network correctly. I know this because I am the ‘go to’ guy for all my friends and family when it comes to getting networks up and running, and the number of problems that I uncover almost always have to do with one of two things: user errors or shoddy cables (Coaxial to the modem for those with cable or bad LAN cables). Before you downgrade a products for ‘not working’ make sure that you’ve got your network configured correctly, and that you have functioning cables–I can’t tell you how many times the cable is the problem or where a simple hardware reboot (Shutting down and restarting in the correct order: Modem–>Router–>Additional Devices for power down and then power up) clears up the issue. Take some time to troubleshoot before writing a review!

Funziona perfettamente, sia con ubuntu 12.10 sia con la 14.04, praticamente out of the box.
Ottime prestazioni, unica pecca l’eccessivo ingombro, rispetto ad altre unita’ di prestazioni analoghe grandi quanto un bottone.
Nell’insieme comunque affidabile e soddisfacente

I had a much fancier (and expensive) TP-Link wifi receiver for a few years. A few months back I realized that it was starting to fail. The signal would drop suddenly and to my not so very great surprise it was because the receiver itself had failed and the only way to rectify this was to unplug it then plug it back in.

After shopping around I finally settled on this ASUS receiver because its relatively fair price but also decent reviews. So after getting this hooked up I was amazed how my download speed nearly doubled from an average of 500MBps to 900MBps+ I had always assumed that my relatively low download/upload speeds were a result from the fact that the wifi router is down in the basement and by the time it would reach my receiver, the signal was naturally greatly diminished. With this ASUS Receiver, in comparison to the receiver I had from TP-Link, it’s range was a little lower and it doesn’t have an adjustable antenna and yet it still manages to give me my full down/up speeds with a constant signal that has yet to be broken.

There were however, a few headaches setting this thing up but I’ll just list those below under cons.

Pros:
A good price for what’s turning out to be a great product. Great reception. Able to pick up the wifi signal through 2 floors and a wall with ease. Small form factor that allows it to be slotted into nearly any USB port even if you have USB cables occupying all other ports around it.No super bright LED light. (TP-LINK Receiver had a bright green LED light(s) that would flicker constantly)

Cons:
In order to use this receiver you have install the driver from the disk onto your computer which normally isn’t a big deal however in doing so, you’re also forced to install an incredibly annoying ASUS Utility program that starts up each and every time you start up your computer. If you try to uninstall the program you’ll also uninstall the driver for the receiver and thus render it useless. And because of this program, each time I started up my computer, I had to wait for the program to start up and select the network I wanted to connect to. The only way I’ve found around this annoying start up program is by utilizing another program that you can use to allow or disable certain .exe files from activating on a system start up. So by disabling the ASUS Utility .exe file (it’s under a different file but too complicated to bother getting the full file name) Windows automatically connects to your network like it normally would.

Although the Con is initially a headache bordering a migraine, once getting around the issue with the utility program, it’s by far one of the best receivers I’ve ever got and I definitely recommend it but with caution because of the annoying Utility program…

This worked straight away with Linux Mint just plugged it in and off it went