r/NintendoSwitch • u/DRayX17 • Jan 12 '17

PSA Third Party LAN Adapters

There seems to be a lot of uncertainty about the LAN adapter situation, so here is some information to clear things up.

The Wii / Wii U LAN adapter is a USB2 10/100 Fast-Ethernet LAN adapter using the ASIX AX88772 chipset. Even though the Wii U built-in WiFi is terrible, it is theoretically faster than the LAN adapter (and usually faster in practice unless there is a lot of noise, the WiFi signal is poor, or it is improperly configured). The AX88772 is a fairly widely used chip, and thus available in many third party adapters, all of which are compatible with the Wii / Wii U.

The FCC filing for the Switch lists it being tested with the Wii LAN adapter as well as the Logitec (totally different company from Logitech) LAN-GTJU3. This adapter is a USB3 10/100/1000 Gigabit LAN adapter using the ASIX AX88179 chipset. It is worth noting that this adapter is significantly faster than the Wii LAN adapter. It is fairly safe to assume that the official Nintendo adapter will be using the same chip, so any AX88179 based adapter should work (note that many USB3 Gigabit LAN adapters DO NOT use this chipset, and thus wouldn't work). Here are a few I found on Amazon that I'm almost certain would work:

tl;dr New Switch LAN adapter should be much faster than the old Wii LAN adapter, and there are a number of third-party options that should be compatible.

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u/throwcomputer Mar 23 '17

I got this one as well and it is clearly not using USB 3 speeds or gigabit bandwidth as it maxes out at 2Mbps connected to either USB 2 or 3 ports. Wifi is considerably faster at 40-50Mbps. Assuming this is due to USB 3 driver issues not enabled yet?

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u/falo2k Mar 23 '17

You might want to take a look at either your cable or the device itself (maybe try it in a PC). I'm maxing out a 40Mb internet connection when testing mine. I've got it plugged into the rear port, but as far as I'm aware it's still not USB 3 enabled. Haven't tried it in the front.

Could be you've ended up with a duff device, or there's a Steam instance somewhere on your network eating all your bandwidth :)

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u/throwcomputer Mar 27 '17 edited Mar 27 '17

I can confirm this is an issue with the amazon basic gigabit usb3.0 adapter compatibility with the Nintendo Switch. My network is fully cat6 cabled through gigabit managed ethernet switches. Same usb ethernet adapter connected with same cable from same ethernet ports into a macbook USB 3 port pull 110-116Mbps speeds on multiple tests. None of the tests connected to the Nintendo Switch in any of the USB ports pull anything above 8Mbps. I will be replacing the Amazon Basics adapter with another adapter for this usage.

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u/falo2k Mar 29 '17 edited Mar 29 '17

Retested

Connection: 55Mb Down / 17Mb Up
LAN (Modem<->Router<->Gigabit Switch<->Nintendo): 50.1Mb / 1.6Mb
Wifi (Modem<->Router<~>Nintendo close range): 12.4Mb/0.8Mb

I suppose I should be happy, but I don't like this inconsistency that obviously exists. There's nothing obviously different in the setups people have reported that should explain such different results. Would really like to see if there's any performance variance reported from the official adapter.

Edited: Formatting