Review: Powerline Adapters

I live in an urban area — a large town in Greater London. Like many of you we have broadband, wireless, and a few devices around our home. The wireless networks in our neighbourhood started to increase, so we had to bridge the wireless connection upstairs because the signal got so unreliable. After much experimentation we got a strong network again. However, the network count has increased again, and our signal finally started to randomly drop off (especially for Windows machines, Macs seem to hold on with occasional packet loss).

This isn’t good enough for us; we’re gamers so network dropouts can be frustrating to say the least. I gave in and ordered a pair of ethernet powerline adapters:

I bought the Max Value 200Mbps Home Plug pack from Amazon for around £55. They shipped with two ethernet cables, and a manual and Windows utility on CD. I’ve used them to connect a switch upstairs with our cable modem downstairs. The distance is probably about 15-20m diagonally.

Setup

To set up my network I plugged one powerline adapter into my router and the other into a switch. The network was up within a few seconds of turning on the adapters, and my machines correctly found the router and got addresses with DHCP.

Performance

The powerline adapters will run at any speed up to their rated maximum. Running the Windows-only utility displayed this as 172Mbit, which is already beyond what our wireless could theoretically support.

I get an average of 4ms ping to our router, with no packet loss.

Wiring

Our house is an old Victorian place, so I wasn’t sure how good the wiring would be. I used to get low frequency buzzing on amps, indicative of interference on our power circuits (possibly from the fridge), but this doesn’t affect the powerline adapters.

If they work in my house they’re highly likely to work in yours.

Conclusion

This particular brand of adapter was recommended by a fellow Quite Useful contributor who has been using them for several months without issue. It seems like a lot of people I know who live in towns have switched to them too.

At £55 they’re not incredibly cheap, but you should only need a pair and they ship with cables so you can use them straight away. They come highly recommended for those of you who are into games or own an Apple TV and find wireless sync too slow.

The only slight downside is the Windows-only utility, but if you’re Mac or Linux-based you probably have a way of running Windows software anyway (Vmware, Parallels, Wine). Note that the utility is not essential for using the adapters.