Because it's a perfect solution: stable, fast, reliable. Whereas a dongle always depends on functioning drivers, which aren't always available. Plus that the built-in antenna will provide minimal reception, due to a hidden location behind a box in a complex electrical situation (depending on local circumstances).
It's not perfect, it's a wifi bridge which by its nature is usually poorly implemented, that has a nasty habit of directly impacting speed by potentially 50% or more, produced by an OEM who's history is quite sketchy when it comes to consumer hardware. Having directly interacted with Buffalo's technical side on various consumer NAS/router hardware with obvious security/firmware issues they are really not the best, even when actively supported security holes were rarely patched, they just don't care as long as the product works in most situations even if the fix is stupidly obvious/simple. When you have to resort to pulling in custom firmware from a 3rd party project on multiple occasions to fix functionality claimed on the box, then you know it's not good.
Drivers are built into VIX for several chipsets, it's literally plug and play as you well know and yes a £4 RT2800 has an external antennae as well as driver support.
Antennae wise it depends where the unit is sited, in a typical AV install like this it's all too common to find a bridge in the nearest power socket, behind the TV/AV rack/unit which is just as bad/if not worse as than a dongle on the box.
Once a bridge has been setup, which should be fairly easy and a once-in-a-lifetime job, you can connect as many devices as you want, and all of them will have a decent LAN connection to your home network.
And yes, obviously you would only use a bridge if no wired-LAN is available....
You are kidding right? It's obviously not once in a lifetime as he's having to re-do it (and hasn't looked at the online manual). If he'd deployed a Powerline kit or better yet run cable in the first place he'd have literally the router end to plug into the new router and zero config.
Thank you Rob. I wasn't going to respond to the rudeness of the previous poster.
I did not have the manual to refer to but I remembered that it was defaulting to 1.1.1.1 as an address. which made it difficult to setup.
The other reason I use the Buffalo is I can connect my Vu+, TV, Freeview box and DVD player all talking to the Internet!
Good enough reasons Avalon.
Rude? I didn't suggest you were an idiot for having said hardware, someone who didn't like you or know better, you may have already had it and re-purposed it, someone may have given it to you (I seem to get given routers randomly), or you might just not know much about networking and made a poor choice. I suggested that the product you have is not ideally suited to the task, it adds a layer of complexity that clearly you aren't comfortable with and can't be bothered to google the manual to fix, while it offers bugger all advantages. In 25 years online you're the first person in hundreds of thousands who's been offended on behalf of his hardware, unless you designed/built/released it, then stop taking things so personally. If continue to do so, then I'd suggest the Internet possibly isn't the best place for you and definitely avoid any threads mentioning ZGemma's
A factory reset and specifying an IP in the correct range is all that's usually needed to be able to config it, also from memory the default IP preferred by Buffalo is not 1.1.1.1.1, but hit the manual and have a look as I suggested previously, it's really not difficult to change an adapters IP to the correct range to config the bridge.
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