Home Reviews ,,,,, A History of Ethernet Adapters. In the reporter's activity, always working with the laptop and, more recently, the iPad Pro always in the bag, Wireless connections are the norm but every now and then you can or have to connect even with a good old Ethernet socket. But starting with the MacBook Airs (which this reporter has been using since 2010) Ethernet is an option that requires an adapter.
Up until now the game of connecting to Ethernet had been played with an old classic. The most solid and stable adapter that has always been in the reporter's bag: the legendary A1277, the USB A adapter with 100 Mbps Ethernet port. A real forklift truck: very low consumption, never heats up, practically indestructible (that used by the reporter for eight years it seems to have waged war and also ended up under the wheel of a car). In short, a champion.
If to be used with the “old” iPad required a Usb A-Lightning adapter (which does not need to be powered, so the cheaper version is fine, even if the version with the second Lightning port makes more sense because it allows you to recharge the iPad while connected to the network), now with the 3rd generation iPad Pro 11 and 12.9 equipped with a USB-C port but not Thunderbolt, requires a different approach.
Also because there is at least one MacBook, the ultralight version with 12-inch screen always used by your reporter (who has thus replaced his historic MacBook Air 11 of 2011), without Thunderbolt and therefore incompatible with the new standard adapter of Apple, that is the Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet adapter (which costs 35 euros). For this Apple presents the very valid option produced by Belkin, the USB-C to Gigabit Ethernet adapter (which costs 39.95 euros). But a visit to the Apple Store in Milan to see how to solve a problem with the MacBook 12's ultra-flat keyboard led to a small discovery: Apple Store employees are using another type of Ethernet adapter. It is always a USB-C to Gigabit Ethernet produced by Roline “Designed for professional”.
We got curious. And we went to see who made the device. It is a German company, SECOMP GmbH, founded in 1988 by Michael Taraba and Gunther Schroff, specialized in network equipment and accessories (from adapters to monitoring systems, UPS, cabinets and so on. The company, based in Ettlingen , is not present in Italy but evidently supplies supplies for Apple stores at least in Europe, since we then had the opportunity to see the same type of adapter also in an Apple Store in Berlin and Amsterdam.
Having said that, we bought it since it is also conveniently found on Amazon and it also costs slightly less: 27 euros at the time of writing. The device, as you can see from the images, is slightly larger and has two lights inside that turn on to signal that the connection is active and that it is moving forward. To tell the truth, it heats slightly, and does not seem to have the same build quality as Apple's, in the sense that, instead of being an all-proof monoblock, it is instead composed of two heat-welded halves. However, the connection is solid both on the Ethernet side and on the USB C 3.1 side.
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We tested the adapter in a teaching office of the University of Milan , thanks to the kind invitation of a professor, and we used the new plant and network infrastructure based on Garr's academic backbone. Above all, the Cat7 Ethernet cable and the socket, as well as the new switches of the building of the Department of Computer Science in via Celoria that have just been inaugurated, are all at 1 Gigabit stable (= 1000 Megabit).
Ideal terrain to check the connection without having connectivity problems, perhaps slowed down due to overloads as unfortunately often happens in commercial connections or especially in consumer ones. Furthermore, the reporter usually connects via LTE over WiFi and therefore it makes no sense to think of trying a Gigabit Ethernet adapter this way.
We have done more tests, but as a basis we use that of SpeedTest, which allows us to see not only the connection speed but also a series of other parameters (Ping and Jitter, in addition to lost packets). The results are excellent. As you can see from the tables, the two adapters basically work at the maximum speed allowed and declared: 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps. The completely symmetrical speed (even if there is a physiological slowdown in performance that comes from the way the network equipment is configured) allows you to really do everything since in this way you can transfer a 4-inch DVD-R GB in just over 4 seconds.
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The few times we use an Ethernet network we have got into the habit of using the new Roline with satisfaction, as mentioned both on MacBook and iPad Pro 2018 and we highly recommend it, even to those who use a MacBook Pro or a MacBook Air 2018 with Thunderbolt 3, given that in any case the speed is one gigabit per second and the connection does not allow duplication downstream, thus making it absolutely identical to a connection “simply” Usb C 3.1.
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