BrosTrend: The Conclusion

I've written two articles previously about my less than stellar PCI-e WiFi card that I purchased around a month or so ago. In my last article, I spoke about how after I threatened to file a formal complaint against them that they finally agreed that they would honor their warranty. Well between last night and today, we've finally reached a conclusion!

It's taken nearly a week and a half to finally come to a resolution, but I'm glad to say that one has finally been met at least. Last night, they sent me an email stating that I should reach out to the seller on eBay to ask for a refund. I told them that the seller had a 30 return policy and that the window for that had now passed which was true. They would have probably accepted a return anyways, but since I had already sent nearly 20 emails to BrosTrend over the past week and a half, I wanted them to take responsibility and resolve the issue themselves. I wasn't wanting to wait any longer as taking that long to come to a resolution is just ridiculous.

Last night, they responded with an offer that I accepted. They offered me a $14 USD refund via Paypal and that if I agreed to it that they would just let me keep the device. They think that I paid $28 for the device, but I actually got 10% off of that price that I showed them so I agreed to those terms since I got more than half of what I paid for it back and got to keep the device after all. The latter part there saved me a bit from having to ship it back to them. What's ironic is that as of yesterday, the 2G mostly works on the device, but 5G is pretty much done for on it. Maybe I'll tinker with it since I'm pretty good with tech and try to get it working again.

The only thing that they asked of me was to provide them with my Paypal email and pictures of the device to prove that I did in fact have it which I did. They haven't responded to my last email just yet, but an hour ago Paypal notified me that I had money from them waiting in my account which I transferred to my bank account.

I was originally going to just turn around and buy a very similar USB3 WiFi adapter from eBay for $15, but I decided to look at the manual for my PC and felt really dumb afterwards. The $2 USB WiFi adapter that I've had for months now that I've spoken so poorly about... is actually WAY better than I gave it credit for. It turns out that I had it plugged into a USB2 slot this entire time instead of a USB3 slot. My speeds with it on USB2 were around 0.1 Mb/s whereas with it plugged into USB3 I'm now getting around 12 Mb/s! What that means is that it's fast enough for watching 1080p Youtube videos and general web browsing without any slowdowns. Also, for downloading files it's also fast enough for what I need at the moment. For $2 with free shipping, it's actually a damn good device!

So in the end, a resolution was met, and it turns out that I have a good enough WiFi card for what I need after all. The BrosTrend one is boxed up and put away for the time being. While it's 2G usually works, my $2 tiny USB WiFi adapter gets the same speeds as it, but with my cheapo one, I know that it won't ever cut out on me.

I don't think BrosTrend makes terrible products, but I can't recommend them at all. Their customer service was terrible and took way longer than it should have. You can pick up WiFi cards on eBay that will give you similar performance for usually less than half the price of theirs. I'm a big proponent of smart shopping to make money stretch and in the end, my tiny little no-name USB WiFi adapter has done much better than a name-brand $30 PCIe WiFi card and I plan on using it for many more months to come!