802.11ac wireless was introduced at CES 2012. Unfortunately when the devices were launched there were no adapters to support it. This meant that people were buying expensive wireless products without having any way to support the speeds they were capable of. Fortunately at CES 2013 a couple of manufacturers started releasing 802.11ac adapters. However, there are two schools of thought about how to implement these adapters. We will be taking a look at both in the next couple of weeks, but we will kick things off with a look at the USB 2.0 NETGEAR A6200 Dual Band 802.11ac WiFi Adapter. Let’s dive in and take a look.
NETGEAR Genie -The software that NETGEAR includes with the A6200 is not bad. Usually I like to allow Windows to control networking as having a third party application controlling it can affect performance. Here it is Windows 8 that slows things down a little. When I first installed the A6200 on out new Samsung Series-7 Chronos laptop Windows 8 was able to connect using 802.11ac. All we saw for speed was 300Mbps n even on the 5GHz band. It was not until we installed the NETGEAR Genie that we started seeing the speeds we were expecting.
When you open up the NETGEAR Genie application you start off staring at the networks available in your area. When you find the network you want and click it to connect you will get two options; one to connect manually and the other to connect using NETGEAR’s Push ‘N’ Connect. We chose to do things manually as WPS can still be something of a security risk.
The rest of the application is informative, but really does not bring anything else to the tablet with the exception of the update and diagnostic info buttons found on the other page. Still it was the only page that let us know we were connected using ac. Windows 8 still thought we were connected using 802.11n, it was unusual to see this happen and yet get the speeds we were.
