I have an outdoor application including an RPi3 which requires connecting to an xfinity wifi hotspot but the signal is weak. Therefore I tried adding a USB wifi dongle with antenna to improve connectivity.
I bought two of these: EDUP Wireless N Adapter 300Mbps 2.4GHz
They are plug and play and I had no problem connecting to xfinitywifi and logging in from the browser. I did however have to disable the onboard wifi interface sudo ifdown wlan0
as both modules were connecting at the same time.
The problem now is that despite the specs on the USB dongle and the better signal quality, we get roughly 4-5 times lower upload/download speeds, compared to the built-in wifi module!
Here are some speed tests, ran on speedtest.net. We tried 2 of these dongles and the results were similar (so it's unlikely the module is faulty)
Here is the iwconfig
for USB dongle:
IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:"xfinitywifi" Nickname:"<WIFI@REALTEK>"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: AE:34:26:27:68:36
Bit Rate:144.4 Mb/s Sensitivity:0/0
Retry:off RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=96/100 Signal level=55/100 Noise level=0/100
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
Here is the iwconfig
output for built-in wifi module:
IEEE 802.11 ESSID:"xfinitywifi"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: 0E:51:A4:D3:F1:D2
Bit Rate=72.2 Mb/s Tx-Power=31 dBm
Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:on
Link Quality=55/70 Signal level=-55 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:18 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
sdio
with potentially much higher throughput than external dongles, which share the USB2 hub with other peripherals.