Amazon Basics USB 3.0 to 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet Internet Adapter

I bought the USB 3.0 version of this product in December 2018 to play Super Smash Bros Ultimate online. Although that game has issues with lag that I think can only be fixed at Nintendo’s end, it has otherwise worked perfect for me without issues. I changed from DSL to Fiber in my house and it still worked without issu… I bought the USB 3.0 version of this product in December 2018 to play Super Smash Bros Ultimate online. Although that game has issues with lag that I think can only be fixed at Nintendo’s end, it has otherwise worked perfect for me without issues. I changed from DSL to Fiber in my house and it still worked without issues. Recently I bought Animal Crossing in the eShop and downloaded it blazing fast thanks to this adapter. To anyone that says it won’t work with the Switch, they either bought the 2.0 USB adapter or they are not plugging the adapter into the back — or the adapter itself is bad.

For anyone having issues, first and foremost MAKE SURE you are using the USB 3.0 ethernet adapter and PLUG IT INSIDE THE BACK OF THE DOCK’S CASE, you will notice that USB port is blue while the outer ports are not. I have no idea if it works on the outside ports, even if it did you will not get full speeds because those ports are USB 2.0 — yes the back of the will NOT close with the USB adapter in, but that affects nothing except aesthetics. If the 3.0 adapter does not work for you when plugged into the back blue USB port, return or exchange it.

I bought this adapter for my wife’s MacBook Pro but my computer science major son couldn’t get it to work, macOS never recognized it. He gave up and gave it back to me. I tried to get it to work on my little MacBook Air that I play on when I’m sitting on the couch, my work system is an iMac 27" with an Apple Thunderb… I bought this adapter for my wife’s MacBook Pro but my computer science major son couldn’t get it to work, macOS never recognized it. He gave up and gave it back to me. I tried to get it to work on my little MacBook Air that I play on when I’m sitting on the couch, my work system is an iMac 27" with an Apple Thunderbolt Display to give me dual screens. (and a LOT of real estate for working!)

I had the same problem as my son had, the OS wouldn’t recognize the adapter, so I came here to research the issue. THANK GOD, Allah, the Easter Bunny, whoever, for the following:

"Yes, works perfectly. Installed it on MacBook Air with 10.13.2. Get the latest driver from asix.com.tw. Watch out for the pop-up after reboot, asking you to load the system extension with a funny asian name. You must allow it. If you don’t, it won’t work because the extension gets disabled (this can easily be fixed in "Security and Privacy" settings). If you can read the PDF that comes with the driver, you can make it work. see less
K T answered on January 15, 2018"

This person should be made a technical supervisor at Amazon. I followed his instructions and BOOM Shakalaka it works! 300 mbps from my Comcast connection. I’m happy!

Although in theory it would seem that you could just attach one on each end of a cat5/6 cable and use it as a USB cable you can’t because the device actually encodes the data in a specific way and doesn’t support the pass through of power as usb does.

Yes… It’s work eseay by totally you just need to plug & play. (About 5 second your computer will auto detected and starting connecting intetnet).. i’m already bought and using it daily almost 2 years never having any problem, and after i testing yhe internet connectiin speed to compare with my computer build-in neteo… Yes… It’s work eseay by totally you just need to plug & play. (About 5 second your computer will auto detected and starting connecting intetnet).. i’m already bought and using it daily almost 2 years never having any problem, and after i testing yhe internet connectiin speed to compare with my computer build-in neteork card LAN RJ45 plug, i found the result of this Amazon Basic USB3.0 can be run more stable & faster internet speed.

I bought it because my laptop does not have an ethernet connection. Works well.

Windows doesn’t load a stack for an adapter it’s not aware of. If you install this, and later unplug it, the stack will vanish, but will return when you plug it back in.

I have no idea what the CD is for, I didn’t use it. I have a macbook pro and the adapter is truly plug-n-play. Just plug it into the usb on your macbook and you are good to go. You also can just remove when done; no need to "eject" from finder.

That is done in your network setting on whatever device you have this attached to. If you are not familiar with what I just said, I recommend you leave the device on its dynamic network setting mode. You should not have an IP address conflict issue on your network as the router will sort that out.

No! It’s not grounded and there’s no need to ground.

Buy a new one.

Doesn’t work for me

Works fine with Ubuntu Linux, plug and play, no drivers needed. I had a non-functional RJ45 Ethernet port, and I was able to use this device to get my computer access to my local network.

I don’t know about a downloadable driver but there is a CD which comes with this device. On that CD is a folder named "AX88179_178A_Win10_8.x_v1.18.3.0_Drivers_Setup_v1.0.2.1" Within that folder is a setup.exe file. Just double click that file and run the setup. What that is completed, plug in the device and you w… I don’t know about a downloadable driver but there is a CD which comes with this device. On that CD is a folder named "AX88179_178A_Win10_8.x_v1.18.3.0_Drivers_Setup_v1.0.2.1" Within that folder is a setup.exe file. Just double click that file and run the setup. What that is completed, plug in the device and you will get an ASIX… Ethernet adapter. Just plug in the device and then plug in your Ethernet cable and all is well.

Don’t know. As an aside, I returned the adapter because it did not work.

No

Picked this up because we have a Nintendo Switch and the WiFi performance kept dropping or not connecting. Plugged this into the dock and into our home network – no changes necessary, the Switch instantly recognized the wired connection (no drivers/no nonsense) and immediately switched over to it (you’ll see the network icon change from wireless to wired). I’m not sure on how seamless the transition is when removing the switch from the dock, since we had pretty poor luck generally with the Switch’s wifi.

Get it, you won’t regret it!

Instructions for replacing your built-in (non-gigabit) ethernet:

1. Plug this into your Pi
2. Log into a terminal
3. Run: sudo reboot
4. Wait for boot, log in, run: ifconfig
5. Write down the HWaddr for eth0 (the built-in ethernet) and eth1 (this adapter)
6. Create the file: /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
7. Add the following two lines:

SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="new", ATTR{dev_id}=="0x0", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth0"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="old", ATTR{dev_id}=="0x0", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth1"

…replacing *new* with the Hwaddr of eth1 and *old* with the Hwaddr of eth0

8. Run: sudo shutdown -h now
9. Swap your ethernet cable from the old plug to new plug
10. Disconnect then reconnect power adapter from Pi

This new adapter will now be eth0 and the built-in adapter will be eth1. If you had rules or services in place that depended on eth0 they’ll use the new, faster connection.

NOTE: Tested using Blackmagic disk speed test from networked Mac client. 20MB/s average read/write speed. The drive is an ext4 formatted WD My Passport 4TB (link below), shared from the Pi via netatalk AFP.

WD 4TB Black My Passport  Portable External Hard Drive – USB 3.0 – WDBYFT0040BBK-WESN

Let me start off by saying I am using this on 2 different MacBook Pros running macOS High Sierra. This adapter worked perfectly once I installed the correct driver. The driver offered on the included disc does NOT WORK. You must go to the driver download page on the ASIX website to get the latest driver. Amazon will not allow direct links to external websites. You will need to search for AX88179 on the site – I downloaded and installed
‘Apple Mac OS X 10.6 to 10.12 Drivers Installer’ (revision v2.9.0 released on 2017-04-26).

Once installed and my Mac restarted the USB Gigabit device appeared in Network Preferences. I have 1000Mbps up and down fiber to the home. Usually I get much more on the DL side, but when I ran the test I did not limit other services. Primary picked this up to use for full Time Machine backups on my local network to the drive attached to my Airport Extreme Base Station as it is much faster than backing up ~300-400GB over wifi.

I got this to conduct an experiment. It worked just great! to explain, my computer only has base 10/100 and a USB 2.0 interface. Since the USB 2.0 interface is faster than the base 10/100, I hoped that using this on a USB 2.0 port would give a faster data rate over using the base 10/100 port. I am very happy that it did, the data rate is in most cases at least twice as fast as the base 10/100.

Update 08/31/2017 – I use this on a laptop that only has USB2 port and the Ethernet is base 100. USB2 has a speed of 480 megabit which is faster than the 100 megabit of the Ethernet. Using the adapter for my Ethernet instead of the Ethernet port on the laptop gives me much higher speed and performance.

I got this in combination with the AUKEY USB-C Hub with HDMI, 4 USB 3.0 Ports, Type-C Power Delivery Throughput Port for MacBook Pro, Dell XPS 15, Google Chromebook and More for my 2017 mackbook pro that only has usb-c ports. While it was not plug and play, I did get it to work on macOS 10.12.5 with the driver I found here (plugable.com/drivers/usb3ethernet/) for the ASIX 88179 released in April. It would be nice if Amazon provided the link to drivers for products that it sells under the amazon basics brand, but after about 30 minutes I was able to find the driver and get it working. Hope this helps and it works for you.
It would be nice if Amazon provided the link to drivers for products with the amazon basics branding.

UPDATE: Nintendo Switch [06-27-2018]
I recently got a Nintendo Switch and this ethernet adapter works well with it (albeit at max download speeds of around 100Mbps).

A lot of reviews say that the adapter doesn’t fit in the back of the dock and that the cable is too short, but I’ve found a way to make it work! Essentially, plug in the ethernet adapter and bend it up to the open part along the top of the dock. Then, ‘S’ route the ethernet cable along the top, down the left side, and out of the cable management hole. This will allow the back cover to close and maintain a clean look (I’ve attached photos below). Using a flat ethernet cable helps a lot as well; mine came with an Asus router that I use at home.

Download/Upload speeds have improved compared to 5GHz Wi-Fi. Even though the Switch’s USB-C is locked at USB 2.0 speeds at the moment, using the built-in speed test determined that download speeds almost doubled and upload speeds increased by about 25%. I’ve attached screenshots of those results below.

Until Nintendo releases firmware that unlocks use of the USB 3.0 standard on the Switch, we’ll be stuck with around 100Mbps download speeds. However, using this ethernet adapter will result in a faster and more stable connection compared to Wi-Fi for most people.

Again, well done AmazonBasics.

Original Review [09-08-2016]
Got this to use with my Razer Blade Stealth which doesn’t come with a LAN port.
I got full gigabit transfer speeds when moving large files across my local network.

NAS (FreeNAS) to Blade Stealth = 113 MB/s
Desktop (Win10) to Blade Stealth = 110 MB/s
Blade Stealth to Desktop = 107 MB/s

Even when plugged into  Anker Ultra Slim 4-Port USB 3.0 Data Hub , transfer speeds were full gigabit.
NAS to Blade Stealth through USB 3.0 hub = 110-113 MB/s

Super fine product from AmazonBasics.

UPDATE: As of 5/21 there is a driver available at asix.com.tw that is now compatible with MacOS Big Sur on both Intel and M1 macs. With this driver installed, the device functions perfectly.

The chip at the heart of this dongle is the Asix AX88179. Up until the release of Big Sur, this was not a problem. But now Asix does not have a driver that works properly under Big Sur. They do have a driver you can download, but part of the installation calls for you booting into the recovery partition and DISABLING SYSTEM INTEGRITY PROTECTION. That is like buying a new car and using a crowbar to remove all of the seatbelts and airbags. It’s a terrible, terrible thing to ask customers to do.

What’s particularly infuriating is that Asix had all summer to write new drivers under the new USB ethernet APIs that Apple released (specifically so that they could lock down ring 0 kernel extensions as a security improvement). To some extent I do feel their pain – Apple has a bad track record of moving the API cheese a lot. But even so, as I said, they had all summer long to come up with a proper solution and still, even with Big Sur having been out more than a month.

Oh, and don’t expect the driver they do have to work with the new Apple Silicon macs either.

Hard pass.

I wasn’t satisfied with Wi-Fi performance in my room, so I figured I could get one of these to have faster, wired Internet. MacBooks no longer come with Ethernet ports, but this thing works pretty much as well as a laptop with a built-in Ethernet port.
It’s not quite plug-and-play on macOS. You’ll need to install drivers from the Asix website (the chip manufacturer for the adapter); I found it by searching "asix AX88179", navigating to their website, and scrolling down to their drivers section. It’ll run you through the installer, and you will need to reboot at the end. Once it’s done, it’ll pretty much auto-detect and connect you to the network. If not, you can just go into the Network Preferences pane and check to see if "AX88179 USB 3.0 to Gigabit Ethernet" is connected.
It is indeed plug-and-play with Ubuntu, and probably will be for other Debian-based distros. I haven’t had the chance to test on Windows, but network speeds on Ubuntu and macOS are pretty much the same as on my desktop with a built-in network card.
The Ethernet plug has the typical built-in LEDs to show activity and connection speed, and cables click in pretty solidly. I haven’t moved it around much so I can’t say much about cycle life. The USB cable feels a bit rigid, but I guess that’s typical of USB 3.0 cables due to the increased number of conductors.
Anyways, it does what it should, and it does it pretty fast!

Wow!!!!! From 72.0 Mbps (wi-fi) to 100.0 Mbps (ethernet connection) on my old previous laptop to 1.0 Gbps on my new laptop using this adapter!!!!!
Since my new laptop came without an ethernet port – and because I really wanted this specific new laptop — I resigned myself to using my wi-fi connection instead. My current internet provider seems notorious for slow internet speeds. Watching streaming video and even accessing the internet was trying my patience constantly but — even if a higher speed was available in my area the cost would be more than I was willing and able to pay.
I googled this problem to see if others experienced same problem. Googling and speaking with a customer service representative at my internet providers suggested that – as an alternative — I use an ethernet connection which would make a very noticeable difference in connection speeds. Using my ethernet connection my speed jumped from 72.0 Mbps to 100.0 Mbps; however, the speed was still lagging.
I was "shopping" here on Amazon (BTW, Amazon is my one-stop shopping with exception to my groceries. Amazon is amazing, and they are credible and reputable and stand behind their satisfaction guarantee as well as stepping in when a third-party seller did not measure up to their guarantee and return policies. Mind you, that only happened one time where Amazon had to step in to resolve the issue.
Anyway, I digress. Nothing usual! LOL. I was searching out of curiosity to find out if there was some way to connect to ethernet without an ethernet port available. I discovered this alternate solution. I was pleasingly surprised when I switched to just wi-fi connection on my new laptop just to see what the difference was between the Mbps and using this adapter. I was used to the wi-fi connection speed being 72.0 Mbps and never even thought of checking to see what it would be on my new laptop. I do not know why but my new laptop using wi-fi was a whopping 144.0 Mbps versus my old laptop internet connection speed. I do not know why this is, but I will take the “WIN”.

Unlike noted in some reviewes, this thing works like a charm on OSX 10.13.2 High Sierra. Bought it for my wife’s older MacBook Air, and got it up and running with no issues. I still don’t get it why Air doesn’t have an Ethernet port, but trying to apply common sense to Apple’s design decisions is an exercise in futility. I gave that up long ago… For those quick to say that Air is too thin for an RJ45 – no, it’s not (it only looks that way). Especially considering Apple’s trademark precision in manufacturing. Anyway, I digress…

Just get the latest driver from asix.com.tw, follow the included PDF to install, and you are good to go. Watch out for the pop-up after the reboot, asking to load a system extension. You must allow it. If you don’t, or just close the pop-up, it gets disabled (happened to me). It’s an easy fix through "Security and Privacy" settings. It’s all described in the doc that comes with the driver.

Overall, a great product for the price, for those who don’t want to live inside an Apple cocoon. I am a bit concerned about the USB cable, as the only strain relief for it is a little countersink in the hole where the cable goes into the box. But the cable feels very solid, and it may be enough. Time will tell…