My HomePlug AV Experience

2010-01-25 Update
When I turned on my treadmill, we lost connection. I've returned the homeplugs; just too much trouble.

My experience with the Linksys PLK300 homeplug AV kit was a mixed bag.

The first disappointment was in the advertising of the 200 mbps number. Take note, the truth is that the network these devices create can NEVER be above 100 mbps because of the 10/100 ethernet specs. This is of course written in fine print on the BACK of the box, but it took me a while to discover this.

My testing showed that I was getting about 18 mbps. This is across circuits, and the house is 1 year old. So the wiring was very new, but it was going cross-circuit which is cause of speed decrease I hear. (Note: further testing pointed to speeds as low as 8 mbps).

When I dug further, however, I realized that my testing was happening where my receiver was on an AFCI circuit and that somehow was causing problems with the speeds. Indeed when I moved the receiver to a normal circuit my speeds were much, much higher. Expect a huge performance hit if you're trying to use a plug that is on an AFCI circuit breaker!

The good news is that it wasn't the homeplug that was at fault.

The second disappointment was that after testing a pair, I decided to buy another pair and extend the network. What I found is that the two additional plugs, with no computers attached at all, dropped the bandwidth of the overall network by sometimes up to 8mbps, almost in half. So I decided to return the extra two. After learning about the AFCI part, I might challenge my findings on this second point. As my testing scenario had to pass through 2 separate AFCI breakers. I, however, am not going to do any further testing at this point to have a conclusive answer to whether the additional plugs caused a performance hit.