There have been times in the past when I've found almost every USB ethernet adapter available on the market to be of a single chipset. If one very common chip a

There have been times in the past when I've found almost every USB ethernet adapter available on the market to be of a single chipset. If one very common chip at that time had a poor interaction with your school's switches, boom. Most of the time, the cheap no-name electronics I've encountered have been pretty feature-complete, or even feature-laden, and any bugs were usually minor annoyances rather than fatal flaws. But the quality control is a crapshoot, so a good chunk of them tend to be DOA. Of the ones that work fine at the start, many will fail in the following weeks, months, and years at much higher rates than you'd expect.