Legit Reviews

Powerline Network Adapter Shootout

Considering buying a Powerline adapter to connect that Xbox or PlayStation to your high speed internet without drilling holes and running cable in your wall? Maybe you are just tired of the lag your wireless connection gives you when you are trying to stream movies to your television. We take a look at some of the most popular brands of "Gigabit" Powerline Ethernet Adapters from Belkin, D-Link, Netgear, and TRENDnet. Read on to see which one comes out on top.



Article Title: Powerline Network Adapter Shootout
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1895/1/

Very interesting. Things have improved over the last year or so.
I'm using a pair of "Asoka" brand ones, generation 2; 125Mbps speed.
I occasionally have to reboot them, say once every 3 months.

Did you have any problems with connectivity if you use something like the vacuum cleaner?
Typically some devices cause noise on the powerline and lower performance.
It would be interesting to see if they have found a way to cope with this.

Some things just can't be run over Wifi. I run a iSCSI target on my NAS for vmware and the latency over wifi is unbearable.
The powerline gives me "close" to Ethernet latency - sub 5msec

I tried to conduct the tests while the house was relatively "quiet" in the evening when there wasn't too much noise in the line just so I could get the maximum speeds from the boxes. Your idea is a good one though and maybe the next time we speed test powerlines, we will through the "vacuum" test in there.

Based on your conclusions, how would you explain the results in this review which seem to be the opposite?

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/l ... l=&start=2


I am looking for a solution and researching these before I make a purchase, and I am now thoroughly confused at the
data I am seeing.

pagodeiro wrote:Based on your conclusions, how would you explain the results in this review which seem to be the opposite?

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/l ... l=&start=2


I am looking for a solution and researching these before I make a purchase, and I am now thoroughly confused at the
data I am seeing.

At first glance (for me, at least), the results look fairly consistent - especially when you look at how the TRENDnet performs. Of course all of the Powerlines show a drop in speed as you move up in distance.

I think one of the big variables that wasn't addressed in the review that you linked was the packet sizes used for those tests. Because there is a significant difference in speeds when looking at the size of data that you are transmitting, we wanted to include a swath of test packet sizes to give the reader a better understanding of how these Powerlines perform.

Like we said in the article, the results of our tests will resonate with you depending on the type of data you plan on transferring - Streaming A/V, e-mail, general computing, etc.

Can you mix powerline modules from different manufacturers on the same network?

gkeeler wrote:Can you mix powerline modules from different manufacturers on the same network?

Yes you can even though the performance might not be optimal.

Digital Puppy wrote:

gkeeler wrote:Can you mix powerline modules from different manufacturers on the same network?

Yes you can even though the performance might not be optimal.

Not always. You can in some instances. It is supposed to work, but in reality it is fairly hit or miss from what I have seen. As long as you keep it to the same vendor though it seems to usually work correctly.