Now You're Playing With Power!
The latest iteration of the D-link PowerLine HD Ethernet LAN-over-power adapters promise speeds ‘up to 200Mbps’ using nothing more than the adapters and the standard power outlets in your home. It’s a remarkably simple concept with as easy of a setup. You just plug one adapter in near your router or high-speed modem, connect them via LAN cable, plug in the second adapter anywhere in the house and voila! You now have a single high speed network port wherever you have access to an outlet. The idea is great for those of us (not naming names) who live in the basement of a house where the household Wi-Fi cannot reach or performs very poorly.
On the units there is an indicator light that glows in one of 3 colors (green, orange, and red) to let you know how good the quality of the link is between the two or more devices (green being the best and red being the worst). The adapters also come with a piece of software that allows you to visually see how many adapters on are the network, change the identifying names of each adapter for easy identification, and a one to three bar signal strength indicator much like the lights on the adapters themselves. This software also allows you to change the name of or encrypt the PowerLine network from the default name to ensure that anyone else in the building cannot access that particular PowerLine network.
Trying to get a good signal seemed to be a hit or miss affair. Naturally, two adapters right next to each other seemed to always have a strong signal, but move one of those adapters to another floor and it’s a different game entirely. We attempted literally every combination between 5 upstairs outlets and 8 downstairs outlets and was eventually able to find a combination that worked well. We tested our Internet connection (50 Mbps down/10 Mbps up) and were able to get full speed without an issue, likewise for network file transfers which transferred at roughly the advertised 200Mbps.
That is… for a little while. The one issue with this product is that the adapters get very hot after a while, and once that happens network performance drops considerably. Many of my network tests timed out and our Internet download speed dropped to a pitiful 1-2 Mbps. The product features a network activity idle sleep feature which powers down the adapters when network traffic has ceased for a period of time, but this feature did not seem to help in this instance.
Even worse: once this happened, even unplugging both units for an hour to cool down didn’t seem to help improve the network performance. Of course, with there being so many unknown variables to household power (or at least to those of us who are not electricians), it’s hard to tell if the problem is with the units themselves or if something somewhere else in the house is causing this shoddy performance. In smaller places, like our offices and an apartment that we tested, we didn’t have quite the same level of trouble- but also didn’t have the need either.
Overall, when the product works, it works quite well. Top that off with a much cheaper price tag (MSRP $139.99) than competing products, and the D-Link PowerLine HD Network Starter Kit is a pretty good deal, but we’d recommend buying from a store with a good return policy, and doing some tests to see how it works for you. Available at Amazon for around $110.
