Talk:List of 802.11ac Hardware/Wireless Adapters

It's almost 4 years since 802.11ac has been finalized in 2013. Why does the "popular devices" list not list any device enabled for ac?
 * That has been bothering me too but the only insight that I have into what adapters are popular is what a site like Amazon or Newegg lists as popular but these could just be sponsored products. Do the site administrators have access to page hit counters which could be used to determine what adapters people are most interested in?--Dave (talk) 12:35, 26 August 2017 (EDT)

Does anybody know an 802.11ac USB3 wifi adapter with mainstream kernel support which can be bought? According to https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers, only Broadcom produces suitable chipsets, namely BCM43143, BCM43242 and BCM43566, but I could not find any wifi adapters with these chipsets.

No major changes have really occurred within the past few years, besides to device/list pages, and most were from users not named 'm86'. AFAICR, per page hit counters are disabled (also, piwik is disabled) right now due to performance reasons.. but yes, it could obviously use updating. Regarding USB3 AC and in-kernel support, I don't expect you're going to find anything, mostly because... BCM43143 (bgn, 1x1) and BCM43242 (abgn, 2x2) are also not AC chipsets. Barring new drivers for Realtek and MTK hardware, the Linksys WUSB6100M, using QCA9377 might be the most likely peripheral to actually achieve support, if ath10k implements USB support in the future.
 * Most Linux drivers out there for USB AC hardware are out-of-kernel.
 * brcmfmac mostly supports chipsets which don't have mainstream adoption as peripherals. BCM43526 (a 1st-gen AC chip) saw considerable adoption, but it doesn't use a FullMAC driver architecture. If you do manage to find a USB 3.0 AC device with a Broadcom chipset, it would probably be a module used in a smart TV (or something along those lines).
 * I would expect USB peripheral demand is largely in free-fall with the decline of traditional PCs and the rise of mobile
 * M86 (talk) 17:54, 27 August 2017 (EDT)
 * Thanks for this comprehensive answer! 94.217.31.150 03:38, 29 August 2017 (EDT)
 * I've now bought an PCI-E card (Intel AC 7260, which is in fact a mini-PCI-E card with an adapter) and it works fine out of box with the mainline kernel. I think the general recommendation is: Get a well-supported laptop hardware with an PCI-E adapter if you want reliable wifi on your desktop. 188.98.240.182 07:20, 6 September 2017 (EDT)

ASUS DSL-AC88U
Hi there - i've been a viewer of this site for a while but only just registered and begun to edit (though a wikipedia user for over a decade). I've made some changes which I believe are in the best interests and are more correct, however if i've done something that is clearly incorrect, are you able to inform me what? Please tolerate me while i'm new here - thanks. NoFixedAddress (talk) 16:09, 20 December 2017 (EST)