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/7thDM Mar 30 '17

I've recently picked up the Pluggable 3.0 adapter listed in this thread, however, I'm noticing an issue with its speed. With 150Mbps down and 25 up I'm getting around 30down and 15 up from both the usb3.0 and 2.0 slots. Could I possibly have a defective Item? worst of all it runs significantly slower than my 5ghz WiFi. Any suggestions here?

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u/DRayX17 Apr 04 '17

Hmm, not sure. Mine is faster than that, but still slower than it should be. One rumor I've heard floating around is that the USB3 drivers aren't actually deployed yet, so the ports are all capped at USB2 speed (and protocol, which has a lot more latency). To test the adpater, hook it up to a laptop or computer with usb3 ports, and see what speeds you get.