Is it worth me buying a BT Dual Band Dongle?

OnAndUp

I recently changed to BT Broadband because of a very good deal they had on, and they have given me the Home Hub 4. I could? also buy the BT Dongle for £9

On the main PC I am using I have one of these at the mo:
http://www.tp-link.com/lk/products/details/?model=TL-WN723N

The broadband where I live isn't great anyway Max Speeds of 3.5mb.

So do you think it would make any noticeable difference or is it just a gimmick? Also does it work with XP as there seems to be conflicting info about that?

OnAndUp

I phoned BT & asked, never got a lot of sense - literally!!

Darksun

It won't make any difference to your internet connection speed, you'd only see a possible benefit if you transfer large amounts of data across your home network (you probably don't)

OnAndUp

Thanks - no I don't transfer data across.

Is it more for speed on Fiberoptic Broadband then?

kwikbreaks

The dongle you linked to is already 802.11n so potentially far faster than your current broadband.

A dual band dongle gives you the option of using the 5GHz WiFi band which is likely to have less users on it so if you were having problems because of heavy local use of the 2.4GHz band it may improve that but with only 3,5Mbps ADSL it's unlikely that even a busy 2.4GHz band would have problems delivering that sort of speed.

Range wise 5GHz tends to be worse than 2.4GHz so there is no benefit there either.

I'd say that for you there is unlikley to be any benefit. Even with high speed broadband there is no guarantee that dual band would deliver any advantage - it all depends on how many others areusing WiFi on 2.4GHz nearby.

OnAndUp

Thanks for explaining that kwikbreaks!

We are on the "Superfast Cymru" (which is aiming to have 96% of Wales on Fibreoptic by 2016) list of one of the exchanges to be upgraded but no idea when it will actually happen though! :eek: