But if you look at Amazon people seem to like ZyXel and other units with the same throughput. Also, you cannot plug powerline units into a surge protector or UPS because the filtering in those devices (which is usually a good thing) will filter out the networking signals so if anything gets throught it will be slow.Īlso, I greatly dislike D-Link equipment after unhappy experiences with 3 different (non-powerline) devices of theirs. I have certain fluorescent lamps in my home that will pump so much noise into my electrical circuits that powerline networking slows significantly, so when I need fastest throughput I shut those lights off. Old or poorly installed electrical circuits may provide bandwidth well below what it says on the box.although that might still be faster than wifi depending on your wifi conditions. I then bought a third adapter for my home theater so that I could be sure streaming HD video from the Internet would never be affected by wifi bandwidth competition or interference from the many wifi devices that I and my dense apartment neighbors have.īut you need to know that powerline is highly dependent on the quality of the wiring in your location. The powerline solution delivered a more consistent and faster connection. I chose powerline for a specific distant room in my house where no wifi extension solution was ever sufficient. What you pick is going to depend on your local conditions. I have not used the first two, but I have used Wifi vs Powerline so I can comment on that. I'm thinking that option 3 would be the best for me, because the ethernet connection is pretty much guaranteed to work. As the D-Link one supports up to 200Mb/s it should be 'future-proof' if we get faster internet in the future (and who needs those speeds anyway!) so it should be quite fine. There are more expensive versions of the same sort of thing out there, but I don't think that that means they will necessarily work any better.
Powerline/ethernet over power product, which is not too expensive and should work as it connects to the computer through ethernet. However, it could be difficult to get service and support for this if it doesn't work as it comes from the US, so I'm steering away from it a little. Another USB adapter, recommended by Network 23 earlier in the thread, more expensive but it specifies that it will work with Macs. I should be able to return or replace this if it doesn't work, but does cheaper mean worse quality when it comes to these sorts of things? $19.00. Just a simple USB adapter that is on sale at Officeworks. Does anyone have any experience or tips with any of these? Obviously I just want to make sure I get a good value product that works properly!ġ. Ok, so I have made a bit of a shortlist of products that I think could work for me.