probably a stupid question but

pingu666 · 2 Jan 2016 at 15:14

just order a r7000, and the then found out my surface pro 1 has just 2.4ghz ... so would a usb dongle that does 5ghz only work with/alongside the existing wifi card in the surface pro?

theres small 5ghz adapters so i could just leave that plugged in perhaps.

will windows just use the stronger signal at any given time?

lamboman · 2 Jan 2016 at 15:43

A 5GHz-capable adaptor will support 2.4Ghz as well. So if you used an external adaptor, you'd disable the onboard.

That said, I wouldn't bother. Just run a site-survey on the router to ensure that you're using a quiet channel on 2.4GHz and you'll be good to go.

pingu666 · 2 Jan 2016 at 20:01

TP-LINK Archer T1U AC450 802.11ac/a/n Wireless Nano USB Adapter, 5 GHz Only

cant link because competitors :/ but theres only a 5ghz aerial in it to make it as small as possible, theres a edimax one too

lamboman · 2 Jan 2016 at 21:11

Well you learn something new every day! Didn't know those existed.

Anandtech's review states that the Surface Pro 1 has 5GHz capability (http://www.anandtech.com/show/6695/microsoft-surface-pro-review/7). 2x2, 150Mbps per stream theoretical. No idea if this is official or not, whether it'll work etc.

However, Windows will still see these as two completely independent network adaptors, so they'll connect at the same time. Routing on your system would then decide which network adaptor would take precedence, which wouldn't work well as they'd both be on the same network.

Unless you have a reason to go for 5GHz AC, might as well stick with 2.4GHz N to be honest, at longer distances performance will probably pan out to be similar, and both will be poor for large data transfers.

pingu666 · 2 Jan 2016 at 23:58

hmm, might just have to wait and see, think it might depend on the driver version perhaps

Avalon · 5 Jan 2016 at 15:24

As you've probably noticed by now assuming it's arrived you won't have a problem, the Surface supports a/b/g/n.

From the Netgear spec:

The NETGEAR Difference - R7000
Beamforming+ improves range & performance for both 2.4 & 5GHz devices

bledd · 5 Jan 2016 at 15:48

Just stick with 2.4 for the Surface, wouldn't bother adding a usb dongle

pingu666 · 9 Jan 2016 at 17:50

just to update, the surface pro 1 can see the 5ghz network and i did get a speed bump but not a huge amount over peak, 13/meg sec one room away from router.

but on 2.4ghz the speed varied a lot on the orintation of the tablet, going down to 1-2 meg a sec, with the old router anyways