If you are planning to ditch your ethernet cable and use a USB WIFI stick to access internet,
there are a few things you should know.
The first one is that the sticks are not great at picking up a WIFI signal
if they do not have a direct line of sight to your modem.
If you are using the stick to access internet in another room,
you may lose a significant amount of internet speed.
This means that watching videos can be frustrating.
The video may pause for long periods of time
or lose the synchronization between the video and the audio,
so that the picture is frozen while the audio continues to play.
There is not much you can do about this except provide your computer with a better connection to the modem.
USB WIFI Stick Range
The newest and best WIFI sticks have a range of at least 150 meters,
but each object (a wall, a piece of furniture, or even a bank of kitchen cabinets) will reduce the effective range.
It will also reduce the strength of your WIFI signal.
That means that pages or parts of pages will fail to load,
pictures will often fail to load, and videos will either not play at all
or not play smoothly enough to make them watchable.
Test Your Internet Speed:
If you are having trouble with your WIFI and you have a USB stick,
you can test if the stick is reducing your internet speed
by first connecting your computer to your modem with an ethernet cable
and testing the speed by going to Speedtest.net,
and then disconnecting the ethernet cable and doing the same test with the WIFI stick installed.
In the end,
connecting your computer to your modem with an ethernet cable will
always give you the best possible internet experience.
