On Sat, 21 March 2015, at 6:03 am, Matti Nykyri <[email protected]> wrote: > > I've had nothing but problems with RTL-chipsets. But if you buy ~10$ NICs > they just don't work like 400$ ones.
$10!?!? I paid $2 each, including delivery, for a couple of rtl8192cu / RTL8188CUS wifi dongles a year ago. I actually bought them from different suppliers on eBay and, although they looked identical, they contained different RTL chipsets. As I recollect, one worked perfectly one was flakey or worked not at all, but I was running them on an old PPC iMac and assumed that was the cause. I did a fair bit of debugging, intending to post to the Linux wifi driver developers list, before losing interest. I kinda figured at such cheap prices I could, in future, afford to buy 2 or 3 wifi cards from 2 to 4 different suppliers (so $8 - $24 total) and I'd be likely to find at least one batch that works perfectly. Everyone complains when they get a cheap shitty wifi card that doesn't work, but there is probably an element of confirmation bias to this - we forget about all the cheap shitty wifi adaptors that just work perfectly. Are the name brands really that much more reliable? I originally read your comment as "10$ NICs just don't work like 40$ ones" - realising that you wrote $400 is obviously a different matter. Reliability easily justifies $400 for the datacentre, but not for most home users. Stroller.
