Tenda W311MI — 300Mbps Wi-Fi 6 Wireless Nano USB Adapter

Buying it, and when not to

The W311MI is a 300Mbps Wi-Fi 6 wireless nano USB adapter. It is a tiny USB stick that puts WiFi into a machine that has none, and it is the cheapest item in this catalogue.

Its use is unglamorous and constant: desktop computers. A customer buys a desktop, a cyber cafe builds out ten machines, an office adds a workstation, and none of them have WiFi. A nano adapter is faster to deploy than running cable and is cheaper than a day's labour. It is also the diagnostic tool you keep in your bag - when a laptop's internal WiFi fails, plugging one of these in proves whether the problem is the machine or the network, in thirty seconds.

It is a 300Mbps-class adapter, so it is not the thing for a workstation that moves large files - for that, run Ethernet, which is always better, or use the AX900-class U11 or U11 Pro. For a desktop that sits two metres from the router and does ordinary work, nothing more is needed. And for a machine in a dead spot, no adapter fixes coverage: the problem is the WiFi, and an A18 Pro extender, a mesh node or a ceiling access point is the actual answer. At one hundred and twenty to a carton, stock these by the box.