I recently moved into a new home, and ATT installed their fiber access to second floor, while I'm living on third floor. My computer has 802.11ac support, but as usual, AsRock's mobo has good and stable basic functionality, but additional things suck, including WiFi card. So, I need to find an additional WiFi card.
I don't want a miniPCIe card -- my ITX chassis is a nightmare to teardown and reassemble. I don;t want to touch the internal of the case. I would like an USB one.
I bought a Netgear AC1200 one, based on MT7612U. This POS loses connection occasionally on Windows, with both Asmedia USB3.1 controller (worse, connection loses every ~30 minutes) and Intel X99 USB3.0 controller (doesn't lose connection often, but it still happens). I also tried it on Linux, and it doesn't work at all. There's no stock kernel driver, and driver from MTK website doesn't compile on Kernel 4.0+. Some fan made drivers do compile, but one fails to insert due to dependency issue, the other inserts, but crashes modem manager when using GUI network manager.
So, is there a good USB 802.11ac card that is not based on MTK solutions? I prefer big brands, like Atheros or BCM. AFAIK, I can't use an Intel card with USB. The Intel WiFi cards use PCIe channel for WiFi, and USB channel for BT.
Price must be <=$50, otherwise I will just pay $50 and get ATT workers to move installation to third floor. I probably can do that on my own if I want, the fiber is terminated outdoor in an unlocked box, with standard APC SC connector. I can just move the ONT and WiFi router to third floor, and throw a thin 2mm fiber patch cord to outside through window, and run it to outdoor fiber box.
Any ideas?