Nobody can hope to get anything decent for €5 on ebay so I knew I was buying some piece of junk. But who cares about €5? Though this specific piece of “Made in PRC” junk is even worse than junk. Three problems were discovered before I gave up an stuffed it into a remote box of the things I don’t need but don’t have the heart to throw away. Mind you, I needed and bought two of these.
- It doesn’t go above 10Mbps, it barely hits even that and the transfer speed are really jumpy. 7Mbps is more or less the maximum stable speed.
- On Linux, the drivers don’t pickup or don’t generate different MAC addresses, so you end up with two NICs with the same (00:e0:4c:53:44:58 in my case) Ethernet address. Also there is no way to tell one from the other, no serial number, not anything. The only way is to “remember” what USB port is attached to which cable. And this is unreliable.
- It doesn’t report the link on Linux. Or better, it reports the link even if there is no cable as soon as the driver loads.
I could live with the last two but the first is unacceptable, I need at least 20Mbps in the setup. So if you need anything more than a casual facebook browsing then this junk isn’t worth the time to lookup on ebay.