I checked out the dongle. The descriptions says 802.15.4 so it is plausible that it would enable your laptop to communicate with the mesh network. That's where my knowledge ends. Like @jberi said, that's uncharted territory outside from maybe the engineers. What is intriguing is that dongle might make it feasible to run the thread topology tool so you can visualize the network and how the nodes connect to each other. The same notion has been brought up before: