does the WE826 support a USB wifi adapter?

[Jim S.]

I just got to wondering whether I could upgrade to 802.11ac by plugging in a wifi stick.

[BillA]

You can try it, but if drivers are not included in the router's firmware, it probably won't work.
As an alternative you could disable WiFi on the router, take a cable from any one of its LAN ports (not the WAN!), and connect it to the WAN port of a simple/inexpensive 802.11ac access point/router to give your WE826 super-duper WiFi powers.
Basically you'd be using your WE826 as a wireless modem only, and the accesspoint/router as your WiFi 802.11ac hotspot.

[Jim S.]

Just to see what would happen, before I saw your message, I plugged in an old 2.4GHz "n" adapter that I wasn't using anymore and it recognized it. I didn't try my dual-band '"ac" adapter yet, it'll be interesting to see if it's supported since it's much newer.

The whole reason for this experiment is to see what I can do on the cheap since I already have usb adapters. My download speed isn't suffering from the 2.4GHz connection because it's not that fast anyway, but file transfers between devices on my network aren't moving as fast as I'd like.

[BillA]

Just to see what would happen, before I saw your message, I plugged in an old 2.4GHz "n" adapter that I wasn't using anymore and it recognized it. I didn't try my dual-band '"ac" adapter yet, it'll be interesting to see if it's supported since it's much newer.

The whole reason for this experiment is to see what I can do on the cheap since I already have usb adapters. My download speed isn't suffering from the 2.4GHz connection because it's not that fast anyway, but file transfers between devices on my network aren't moving as fast as I'd like.

Let us know once you try a dual band usb WiFi adapter, and actually test some file transfer speeds on both 2.4 and 5Ghz WiFi. How do you tell/set the router to use the usb WiFi adapter instead of its built in WiFi? I'm assuming you would turn the internal WiFi off, but that brings up interesting possibility, how about leaving both internal and external WiFi on, would both work concurrently? Hmmm....

[JimHelms]

There use to be a list on the ROOTer forum of several USB WiFi adapters that would work.

Might want to search the ROOter archives. It was posted about a year ago.