Since its introduction there has been something of an internal battle with wireless. On the one hand it is very convenient; you just connect to an access point and you have freedom as long as you are inside the network rand. On the other the speed is not always that great and, if the signal is too weak, you can end up dropping packets, files and losing data. Over the years there have been great improvements in wireless speed, but no matter what it has never been able to match the speed of a wired connection. At least it could not until 802.11ac wireless arrived on the scene. This new specification offers a theoretical limit of 1.3Gbps over a 5GHz wireless connection. We have already taken a look at a router and USB 2.0 adapter, now we are going to look at what happens when you put USB 3.0 into the mix with the TRENDNet TEW-805UB adapter.
TRENDNet TEW-805UB -The TRENDNet TEW-805UB is an AC1200 adapter. This means that you are not going to pull off the full 1300Mbps that 802.11ac has to offer, but you are going to get close (867Mbps). Inside the 805UB is Realtek RTL8812AU-VB adapter according to the hardware IDs and the MAC that the device uses. As we mentioned this is not the top of the line module and while you will get some solid speeds there are some tradeoff with this choice. One thing that TRENDNet did do to overcome these is to move away from the more common USB 2.0 connection and opt for USB 3.0. This gives the TEW-805UB more I/O bandwidth to play with (which should mean higher speeds).
The actual adapter is pretty bulky and looks exactly like many other USB adapters from TRENDnet. Because of this bulk you might run into a few issues if you have ports that are too close together. On our Samsung Series 7 Chronos laptop the USB 3.0 ports are very close. With the TEW-805UB in place the second port is not easily used. We were able to use some very slim devices, but without an extension cable we were not using that much. TRENDNet could fix this with a short USB 3.0 extender cable. They have used USB 2.0 version of this in other adapters, but it is missing from this kit.
The specifications on the TEW-805UB are pretty impressive on paper. You can take a look at them, reproduced from TRENDNet’s, website below.
