Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsIt works, but god... It's FAT,
Reviewed in Canada on May 21, 2022
Let's get this straight, it's the size of a half a the length of a standard thumb drive, and fatter than most of them. In which case, if you try to plug this in an adjacent USB port of ANY laptop, it WILL block the 2nd port due to it's fat size.
If physical size isn't an issue and/or you don't use it in a USB port with other peripherals, we can carry on, other wise, don't buy it, it WILL block a USB second port.
In terms of robustness, or actual real life test, I'm behind a 4" concrete wall and about 8 to 9 meters away from my router. I can get 5 to 10mbyte/s depending on where I place my laptop. Which translates to roughly about 80-90mbps on speedtest.net.
I've tried running stress tests on bittorrent for an hour or so. It gets pretty warm, but it never overheats, nor drops connection at all. Transfer speeds were stable at 5-7mbyte/s during the entire hour. I use a different tool to monitor WIFI dropouts, none.
I have a Samsung S10 phone right next to the laptop using this dongle, I get about 210mbps transfer speeds. However, my old laptop can't penetrate the concrete wall, so it had no WIFI whatsoever.
Seriously, the sheer size of the thing is extremely inconvenient, it's a work laptop, and the dongle is the kind of thing where you don't pull it out, its more like plug and forget. And on several occasions, I almost hit the protruding TP-link wifi dongle when I pack up the laptop. I tried the nano version of this by TP-link and... It just got terrible signal and didn't work at all.