Wireless Access

Hello everybody,

This is more of a bit of an early warning. And not really Aruba centric, but we all do wireless and some of you might hit it...

I made a spontaneous purchase of an ASUS AC1200 USB adapter recently, then followed by a Netgear A6200. The idea was to get an early start with some 802.11ac testing. In hindsight, this was a bit optimistic!!!!

The short version of the story, is it turns out both of these adapters (based on the one I purchased in the UK) seem to be restricted to the Chinese regulatory domain, seriously restricting the channel sets (if you're in Europe or the US of course). Quite apart from this being legally worrying, this of course causes all manner of inter-operability problems...

I logged these incidents with ASUS and Netgear, and they haven't responded, for obvious reasons I suspect...

Keep an eye out for things like this!!!

Where did you purchase these?

Actually in PC World in the UK (don't know if you're UK or not). But these are sold by multiple retailers (into and in the UK), so it's not directly their fault I suppose.

Whilst it's not their fault specifically, I did tell the guys in the shop, but as you would imagine, they just looked totally confused and worried by what I told them (especially as this products legality is somewhat in doubt)! The comment was "that sounds like something I should tell somebody". I left them to it.

To be honest, it's more of a pet project for me at the moment. I have it logged with Netgear (gave up and returned the ASUS product as their support is worse than terrible). At the moment, I'm quite enjoying the somewhat technically immature dialogue I'm having with Netgear support reps! It's quite fun.

Good info.  Thanks.  I probably wouldn't have thought about it until after the fact.