Powerline Network Adapter Reviews - The Easy Way Out

Best Overall: ZyXEL PLA5456KIT 1800 Mbps AV2000

What’s this? A promise of 1.8Gbps? If you thought that AV1200 was ambitious, clearly this takes that cake completely. I’m not really familiar with Zyxel and this is the first AV2000 kit I’ve seen. The price seems surprisingly low, considering that AV1200 offerings from people like Netgear is significantly more expensive.

In honor of having so much promised bandwidth, these adapters come with not one, but two, ethernet ports. You also have an outlet passthrough, which is always a very convenient feature. According to Zyxel these adapters also have built-in QoS or “quality of service” functionality built right into them. This prioritizes high bandwidth network traffic such as video streaming so that your multimedia is not interrupted, at the cost of making your other less bandwidth-hungry devices wait a few more milliseconds.

Zyxel is also the first company I have seen provide a smartphone app for the powerline adapter. Certainly others may have it, but I haven’t seen it listed elsewhere. The app lets you do some common troubleshooting tasks and is certainly better at telling you what may be wrong than a few blinking LEDs.

You still have 128-bit encryption as with previous generation devices, which is still plenty secure for home users and, frankly, most business users as well.

In real-world testing people are actually seeing speeds of more than 300Mbps, which is a really excellent result. Some people have reported as much as 500Mbps.

So what’s the downside? As far as I can see there isn’t any, strange as it seems; very positive accounts come from most people who have bought it.

Home Automation Pick: LEA Networks NetSocket AV200

The LEA kit has the distinction of being, hands down, the cheapest powerline kit that I have seen. It’s a slimline adapter and sits snugly against the wall, taking up less space than usual. Somehow LEA have even found a way to include an outlet passthrough at this price, which is quite impressive.

One clue is the fact that this is the old AV200 standard. By now I expect that this tech is pretty much as cheap as they can make it. The LEA units also have filters to prevent device interference and very stable connections. Once again, the AV200 tech is very tried and tested, so the stability is to be expected.

With (realistically) 100Mbps of bandwidth on tap, this kit is going to be unsuitable for high-bandwidth streaming or streaming multiple high-definition videos or large file transfers.

What it will work well for are home automation devices that do not need that sort of bandwidth. Given how cheap these are, you could put a whole bunch in one house and connect up any number of smart devices that could benefit from medium-bandwidth, low-latency, reliable networking.

TP-LINK AV1200 Powerline Adapter, Gigabit w/ Power Outlet Pass-through

Costing almost double that of the AV500 units, but still being pretty cheap, these AV1200 adapters promise as much as 1200Mbps, although you’d have to be pretty gullible to actually expect that, as we’ve seen from powerline technology in the past.

These have nice 16A outlet passthroughs, so that you don’t have to give up that outlet or can power your network device using the same socket. Like other HomePlug devices using this standard, the range quoted is 1000 feet. Of course, the more copper between the points, the less speed and the more latency you are likely to get.

Like other products using this standard you get 128-bit encryption when pairing with the buttons on each unit – something you want to do if you don’t want someone accessing the network through your power grid.

This is the fastest kit that TP-Link makes but, as you would expect, the real-world numbers don’t come close to 1200Mbps. It looks like 100Mbps is a typical figure, with some customers with newer homes and better copper seeing 300Mbps. Anything within that range is likely to be more than enough for most purposes, but if you were hoping to accommodate your gigabit fiber connection it may be better to look at a dual-band wireless AC extender instead.

All in all, however, this is a solid product and for this kit TP-Link offers a 2-year warranty.

Netgear Network Powerline 1200 Review

Netgear’s 1200Mbps offering is only a few bucks more expensive than TP-Link’s kit. That makes for an interesting situation, since in my experience Netgear has been the one who more often edges TP-Link out when it comes to quality and performance. So with the price difference essentially removed, is there any reason to skip the Netgear kit in favor of the TP-Link?

On paper there is very little to set them apart, except for the very obvious omission of an outlet passthrough in the case of the Netgear kit. So if that is a deal breaker you may as well get the TP-Link instead.

Both kits use the AV1200 standard and, of course, both don’t really get anywhere close to that. However, based on user reports I also can’t find the difference in speeds. I thought the Netgear stuff might be a bit faster or more reliable, but it really seems that you might as well save a few dollars and buy the TP-Link kit instead.