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Powerline Adapters?

K

kbutler84

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 26, 2011
128
3
Anyone have any experience with them? I'm about to move, and thinking I might buy a set to try out. I've heard they can be hit or miss, depending on quality/age of the wiring in the home. But when the work, I've heard they work well.

Was thinking about getting the WD Livewire Powerline, as they have good reviews. But I've seen other models rated for 500MB, but most of the lack the number of ports that the WD offers.
 
You pretty much got it already. they are very "hit or miss" depending on the age of the wiring and how they wiring it. I tried to used it on my apartment for the upstairs ATV, and HD content had some issues, I had a couple of Netgears one, nothing highend but they ween't cheap either. my $0.2
 
kbutler84 said:
Anyone have any experience with them? I'm about to move, and thinking I might buy a set to try out. I've heard they can be hit or miss, depending on quality/age of the wiring in the home. But when the work, I've heard they work well.

Was thinking about getting the WD Livewire Powerline, as they have good reviews. But I've seen other models rated for 500MB, but most of the lack the number of ports that the WD offers.
Click to expand...

When we switched to AT&T U-Verse from Cox the AT&T tech installed two powerline adpaters. One in the garage where the 2Wire box was, and one in the frontroom for me to plug my Airport Extreme into. For us, it didn't work so well.

I noticed a marked decline in internet speeds. I was paying for 12D/2U and was only getting 7D/1.5U. Also I saw noticeable lag on my Xbox while playing Live.

Also we had another issue that was unique to us, we have young kids and a baby monitor. The adapter created a clicking interference on the receiving end of the monitor. So bad that I would unplug the adapter at night, which meant no wifi.

If you don't have a baby monitor, and you don't care about lag on Xbox Live, it will work. It just didn't work for us. I ended up wiring my house with Cat5e and new coax and that solved all my issues.
 
My iTunes 'server' is in a separate room from my cable modem/TV/ATV etc., so I bought a pair of "500"Mbps Powerline adaptors a few weeks back, as my Wifi experience was fairly poor.

I'm very happy with them. The max data rate I've seen when copying a file from one Mac to another is about 83Mbps; and file copying isn't always the most efficient usage of bandwidth; I'm sure a local website download would show higher. And for Home Sharing with my ATV, it's fast and reliable.

Obviously, because home-layouts vary, YMMV!
 
Bes thing to do is buy a set from Best Buy or another store and give them a try for a week or so (prob only take a day or two to notice the issues). Then if they don't work for you, or have issue you can simply return them. I returned mine to Best Buy after 2 days, totally not worth it. I got better throughput with a wirelessly extended Airport Express than I did with the PL Adapters.
 
I am using the latest dlink powerline 500 and it works fantastic. Playing blu-ray hdrips

For best speed do not plug into a powerbar.
I did some trouble shooting in my house and found that some locations are better then others. Once you get them plugged in, test out the network speeds.
 
superx said:
I am using the latest dlink powerline 500 and it works fantastic. Playing blu-ray hdrips

For best speed do not plug into a powerbar.
I did some trouble shooting in my house and found that some locations are better then others. Once you get them plugged in, test out the network speeds.
Click to expand...

Can you use a switch with these? I'd like to get an adapter rated for 500Mbs, but I like the fact that the WD version has multiple ports on the adapter.
 
I'm happy with my Belkin videolink 3 that has 3ports 200Mbps got it when they had 50% off sale so it was a steal.
 
I'm using Devolo dLAN 200 Mbps adapters to get Ethernet to my AV cabinet. The adapter feeds an 8 port switch which supplies all the devices that need it (ATV, XBox, AVR, TV, Sky STB). It all works great.
 
kbutler84 said:
Can you use a switch with these? I'd like to get an adapter rated for 500Mbs, but I like the fact that the WD version has multiple ports on the adapter.
Click to expand...

Yup, they're just Ethernet -> power socket -> power socket -> Ethernet adaptors, so at either end, you can plug them into whatever hub/switch/router you like.
 
I'm using the 500 Mbps Zyxel powerline adapters. Absolutely zero complaints. As everyone else said, you just plug them in and it's magic. I've put a real network switch on both sides to see if there's anything weird about them, but everything works just as you'd expect. Mine are on different floors, but on the same circuit.
 
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