Recently been researching USB WiFi adaptors a for my Pi3 given I just installed a PCIe Intel 8290 on my Lenovo Thinkstation M93a and I'm getting a whopping 780Mb/s connection through my WiFi broadband router. I'm also running out of ethernet ports on the router and my preference is to use one for my printer instead of it's onboard WiFi as it nicely WoL. I know the 100Mb/s spped of the ethernet isn't going to slow the Pi down on the web server side of things but it will allow me to site the Raspberry Pi closer to the bluetooth devices it interacts with and will hopefully increase the speeds to my computer. Lets get the current state of affairs:
iwconfig
We see that I'm already connected to my WiFi network using the onboard at a measly 24Mb/s:
mc@RaspberryPi3:~ $ iwconfig lo no wireless extensions. eth0 no wireless extensions. wlan0 IEEE 802.11 ESSID:"MYSSIDNAME" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF Bit Rate=24 Mb/s Tx-Power=31 dBm Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:on Link Quality=70/70 Signal level=-37 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:13 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
I then went ahead and connected my new dongle:
wlan1 IEEE 802.11 ESSID:off/any Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=3 dBm Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:on
Sadly WiFi is still coneected to my onboard adapter. So we can take down the connection by:
sudo ifconfig wlan0 down
Now re can run netowrk-manager's connection UI:
sudo nmtui
To activate the connection:
And we can see we are now connected:
wlan1 IEEE 802.11 ESSID:"MYSSIDNAME"
Mode:Managed Frequency:5.18 GHz Access Point: AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF
Bit Rate=780 Mb/s Tx-Power=3 dBm
Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:on
Link Quality=70/70 Signal level=-38 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:1 Missed beacon:0
780Mb/s, nice :-)
You can check your WiFi connection scripts here:
/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/
it'll show you the connection details, you could probably change them both to be wlan1 or even delete one of them.