As a metric, does anyone have a working axe(4)?
I've seen a number of problems with both axe and other cheap
USB-ethernet adapters. On ones which work, performance is definitely
an issue on some (some can barely do a couple hundred kilobytes a
second, and a gigabit one only does about 40 Mbps). On the other hand,
I use Apple axe USB-ethernet adapters in a few places (Seagate
Dockstar, Raspberry Pi) which run at 60+ Mbps (which is the fastest
the Internet connection goes).
axe0 at uhub1 port 3
axe0: Apple Computer Apple USB to Ethernet, rev 2.00/0.01, addr 4
axe0: Ethernet address 00:1f:5b:fe:c0:ec
ukphy0 at axe0 phy 16: OUI 0x007063, model 0x0006, rev. 1
ukphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
Perhaps some phy improvements from FreeBSD will help, but there's
always the possibility that yours is just really cheap and buggy or
broken.