Summary: Super easy to install, but these only work well if you are connecting two outlets in same room. Avoid these products if you are trying to connect different rooms together.

Installation

This time I decided to compare Netgear HDXB101 product against its competitors, and also measure the actual performance of each.

All of the products I tried are extremely easy to install. Plug one of the adapters into an AC outlet near your cable/dsl router, plug the other adapter into AC outlets in the rooms you need to connect. No drivers to install.

That’s the only positive thing to say about all of these products.

I tried to use all these products to connect 3 different places in the house to the router in the basement. The Kitchen, The 2nd floor office, and the Basement family room. The basement family room was probably the best case scenario since its about 15 feet from the router.

The Kitchen
I could only make the Linksys Powerline AV product connect. All of these products have an LED on the front that indicates if they have linked with another adapter, so it was pretty easy to tell if they are working. Unfortunately while the Linksys may have indicated that it was connected, it was only able to ping 25% of the time and when I tried to use it, it dropped the connection constantly. So NO performance results from the kitchen.

The Office
The Linksys and Netgear products both connected here, but not the Airlink APL-8511 Turbo. Not that it really mattered. Both the Linksys and Netgear products constantly dropped connections during my performance testing (basically just copying files to and from my local test server).

Basement Family Room
This was the only area where the PowerLine adapters would work reliably. The Netgear product has a utility that shows the link connection speed. In this spot the HDXB101 showed ~50Mbps link speed (between this room and the adjacent office containing the other powerline adapter). The actual throughput was much lower: 7.5 Mbps. During this testing, the networking utilization was jumping all over the place, from 1Mbps to 18Mbps, no consistency at all. As a network driver developer, that tells me something is wrong with either the hardware or the software.

Same Wall Testing!
Since I wasn’t getting very consistent results with the fastest rated adapter in the basement family room, I decided to move the testing into the very same room as the router. I used adjacent wall outlets about 6 feet apart.

Now the Netgear Diag utility displayed a 160Mbps TX / 140Mbps Rx.

I tested all three adapters from this “best case” location. Here are the results:

Oh I have two file copy tests, a TX test that copies files from my laptop to the server. And a RX Test that copies two different same sized files from the server to the laptop. The measured speeds are averages of a few runs of each test type.

1. Netgear PowerLine HD
TX Testing: 33 Mbps. Rx Testing: 30 Mbps. The network utilization still jumped around crazily.
2. Linksys PowerLine AV
TX Testing: 40 Mbps. Rx Testing: 30 Mbps. The network utilization was solid for both RX and TX testing.
3. Airlink Turbo 85 Powerline AV
TX Testing: 17.5 Mbps. Rx Testing: 16 Mbps.

Very consistent network throughput during Cisco powerline AV testing

It was interesting to me that the 100 Mbps rated Linksys PLK200 product performs better than the 200 Mbps rated Netgear HDXB101. But as I said earlier I suspect that the HDXB101 has hardware/firmware or software issues keeping it from performing better.

I am disappointed with these products, and I cannot think of any scenario where I would recommend them. They just don’t have the range or speed of even standard wireless-G adapters.

In the basement family room, I can consisently get 20 Mbps with a wireless-G product, and 30 Mbps with a wireless-N adapter. And If I had two machines in the same room, I would just connect them with standard 100Mb (or 1Gb!) Ethernet and get 80 Mbps +.

I’m really curious what lab conditions are at Linksys that enable them to get results of any where near 200 Mbps.