TPL-406E2K

I've never tried Powerline adapters before. Reviews of the first-generation models were all terrible, and I was one of those people who wrote the technology off completely. But fast-forward a few years, and I'm moving into a large apartment with a cable modem in the bedroom and my HDTV in the living room. I can pick up 40 Wi-Fi SSIDs on my laptop, I can't get into the ceiling so I can't do drop cables, and my girlfriend would kill me if I started stringing up cat-5 cable along the walls. I needed something fast, cheap, and largely invisible, and while I was skeptical since this apartment's wiring is so old it still has an honest-to-goodness fuse box, I still figured I'd at least try a Powerline adapter. I settled on the Trendnet brand because they'd gotten some fairly decent reviews on sites like SmallNetBuilder, and seemed pretty fast at least compared to other brands. Installation was simple; basically you plug them both in, press and hold the sync button on the side (I had to do it a few times before I learned how long to hold the button down) on one and then the other, and then wait for them to sync up. Once they do, you're all set! I connected one to my router in the bedroom, and the other to a gigabit switch in the living room, and then plugged all my home theater devices into the switch. AV receiver, Roku, Blu-Ray player, Xbox, they all appeared on the network right away, and voila, Internet access for my entertainment center. Roku does streaming Internet radio, and within minutes I had Pandora playing to my heart's content. The real test, though, was whether I could stream video. I've been using this setup for a couple of weeks now, and let me tell you, Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime all work like a charm. I can stream Bones, Castle, and even Downtown Abbey now in HD with Dolby Digital and I've never had a hiccup. Satisfaction with these really comes down to what you need. The "500 Mbps" claim is a little misleading, because these things only have 10/100 Ethernet and can only connect to your router/switch/Roku at up to 100 Mbps. But like all other Powerline adapters, they're actually slow enough that it doesn't matter; I've read lots of reviews where these "500 Mbps" routers never really work at higher than 50 Mbps in real-world testing. If you're a power user, don't buy these things to connect your workstation and your NAS. But if you're like me, and you have 15 Mbps cable service and want to stream HD video to your Roku, these things may be just what you need.

Plug these in and you got an instant ethernet connection. I was able to get between 5MB/sec and 15MB/sec depending on a number of factors. That being said, this was in a condo building with a lot of electrical signal noise so your results may vary. In any case, these tended to be much, much, much more reliable than wifi in our situation. They are very easy to setup and would be FAR easier than trying to get wifi to work in a larger building or perhaps if you live in an apartment or condo where there's TONS of radio interference from other routers. Also good for putting a wifi access point on another floor of your house. BIG THING TO NOTE: You MUST put these on the same "phase" in your electrical box as I believe I read someone else say. This means that to get any decent performance, you want the outlets to be on breakers that are on the same side of the box. Most boxes have two rows of breakers, so if say your outlets are on the left side, you're golden. If the outlets are controlled by breakers on the left and right side - you might have zero to severely degraded performance. YMMV. In my experiments, I did speed tests in the same room (outlet to outlet on the same circuit) and got the same results as living room to office (two different circuits, but same phase). ALL THAT BEING SAID: - YOU MIGHT WANT TO CONSIDER COAX adapters. These are adapters that like these, plug into an existing wiring system in your house (cable lines) and are generally faster and less finicky. They are a little more money though. So if you are looking for REALLY good speed on your local area network (say for media streaming from server in your office to the living room), then maybe coax is worth the extra coin. IF you're just expanding internet access or something, then these are good enough. As far as bandwidth, if your internet connection is slower than 50MBit (as advertised) then this will not add any speed penalty for you. Anything higher, it will. Most residences only have 1.5-30Mbit so you'll probably be just fine.

**5 month update!** These are still working great and I have good news! I was able to use my existing desktop (an iMac) to send my internet connection to the first adapter in my office which is much closer to the breaker and I now have no loss in speed. So morally of the story is to try different outlets if possible if you are seeing a drop in speed like I was. I am even more pleased with these, especially since they are still the cheapest powerline adapters. So let me explain a few things before the review. I live out in the country with a decent internet speed that works well for streaming HD videos on YouTube and Netflix. With the wifi I get about 17Mbps all over my house. Not the fastest but for being pretty far out of town I'll take it. I recently got a garage built right next to my house with a walk way in between the house and the garage and the room with the router is probably 8 feet away but the garage is a metal building so wifi and cell service do not go through the walls into the garage. I like to have parties and such in the garage but with no wifi or decent cell service, streaming music and such takes a planned downloaded playlist. So you can't just decide on a different song or two with out it being a hassle. So I went on the hunt for a solution that wasn’t getting an ethernet line installed into the garage and found powerline adapters. I was a little skeptical with the signal having to go from one end of the house to the breaker box and then all the way back to the garage. I tested the adapters in the house and the speed dropped from 17 Mbps to about 7Mbps. I took them out to the garage and used the closest outlet to the breaker box with an old router I had sitting around to get wifi in the garage and it got me about 7Mbps as well. While the speed did drop it works well and I honestly am happy with it. These were the cheapest adapters I could find and they work well for what I need even though the speed did drop. Streaming music works just fine. Even a video or two works great. Happy I found a solution!

I built my gaming pc in June, and as a complete newbie to the scene I did not realize the important of an ethernet connection. I've tried multiple different usb wifi antennas, and nothing could provide a stable enough connection for my to play games reliably on. I'd get about 10-15 seconds of gameplay before a random PING spike would interfere. So my $1000 build was effectively rendered useless for online gaming, and since I don't play much single-player on my PC, I was basically only using this computer for school, work, and web-browsing. After months of reading through various Reddit posts, I was on the fence about trying powerline. Boy am I glad I went for it. Let me just say this right off the bat - if you for whatever reason can't use an ethernet connection of any kind and you want to play games online, TRY THIS. I'm only pulling about 75 mbps when I typically get about 150mbps on wifi, but with how stable the connection is, I have no PING issues whatsoever. If any of you play Rocket League, you'd know how annoying PING spikes are that cause your car to start flying all over the field. With my powerline connection, I've put in about 8 hours of online playing without one ping spike, and I'm finally able to take advantage of my hardware. Seriously, if you're on the fence and you play online games, GIVE THIS A SHOT. I've tried so many wifi antennas in all different price ranges, and none have come close to the performance I get here. Yes, the connection is much slower, but the stability is what matters most especially for online games. Don't listen to the Redditors who completely write this off - if you have no other options and can't use ethernet, give this a try and see if it works. Super simple to setup and a true plug and play. If I could give it 6 stars I would. Seriously, I'm so shocked at how well it works, and I'm glad I decided just to give it a try. A true job well done by this company.

Bought these to replace my tp link power line adapters due to possible hacker activity news. These were very easy to set up and work really well with my asus wifi7 router which was also used to replace my old tp link router. One of these was used with a smart plug for my Canon laser jet since it isn't used often. The problem that I had with the tp link adapter is when powering up the adapter and the printer, the printer would fail to receive an ip address from my router which would lead to fiddling with the smart plug and tp link adapter. But with these new ones it locks in the ip address immediately and I have access to my printer and its scan function. Very happy with these. Also use another one of these for my solar PV communication and haven't had problems with that either. Highly recommend. I've been able to get speedtest rates of 200-300 mb/sec speeds. More than I need for what I use them for.

Product: TRENDnet TPL-406E2K We have a WiFI dead spot and I've avoided running cables just because of the hassle of working in two crawl spaces with a suspended ceiling in between. Then I saw this little kit and I figured for the price I could save a lot of work and it wouldn't really be that much more expensive than cable, connectors, wall plates, etc. I was going to write a glowing review the first day I installed the kit and even wrote an email to a friend saying how great it was. It was amazingly simple to install and crawling behind stuff to plug the adapters in and run cables took more time that it did to get the "extended" network up and running. It worked great, until today when the two adapters appear to have lost connectivity Nothing has changed in the house. I tried new cables, updating firmware, resetting the adapters and nothing seems to help. I tried difference receptacles, even two in the same room, and the best I could get is one "bar" and 11 Mbps speed (per the included utility). When I moved the one adapter back to original location connectivity was lost. Online advice from TRENDnet is to try to find receptacles away from other electronic devices. Nice idea but isn't the point of these things to use electronic devices like computers, televisions, and game consoles which all get plugged in? Am I supposed to put the adapter in another room and run network cable back to my computer? I've often said to others that "something is 'the cheapest' for a reason" and apparently I ignored my own advice. So the TRENDnet TPL-406E2K is going back. While I'm tempted pay to twice as much as a similar kit from one of the big names in networking I think run that cable. I'm sure Amazon sells a nice pair of knee pads. <lol>

I bought this to connect a wireless router in the living room to a smart TV in the bedroom of a one bedroom apartment since there was a ton of wireless interference from neighbors. There were no instructions included, not even a Quick Start guide. I found the User Guide online, and after plugging in module A to an outlet and the wireless router I plugged in module B into an adjacent outlet. Module A worked fine, with all three lights on. Module B only had the power light on. Following the instructions I pressed the synch button in Module A and then on Module B, each for 3 seconds. The lights went off/on on each but Module B seemed to not be connecting (just the single power light on). Thinking it might be that Module B needed to be connected to a device, I moved it to an outlet in the bedroom and connected the included Ethernet cable from Module B to the Smart TV. The Ethernet light now came on but the Data light stayed off and the TV did not sense any network. I tried the synch procedure again, as per online user manual, but could never get it to work. I gave up in frustration and returned it. In my opinion, if no instructions of any kind are included with a tech product it should just work. This product did not, and even with going the extra step of seeking out the manual online I could not get it to work. I have set up and tweaked settings in plenty of wireless routers and am fairly computer-savvy so this was a big disappointment. I gave it two stars since it's possible the product was not defective and I just didn't do enough troubleshooting to get it to work. Shame on Trendnet for not providing instructions for a product that is clearly not plug-and-play.

I bought this to fix a problem I had with Netflix streaming, and, after installation, Netflix works "perfectly." I pay Time-Warner for a "Standard Internet" cable connection, advertised as 15 Mbps. And, indeed, speedtest.net always measures 14.5-15.2 Mbps. The cable modem is on the second floor (where my office is) and connects to a Belkin F9K1001 WAP/router, a relatively inexpensive ($40-$50) and, hence, low-powered model. But until recently the wireless (802.11) signal was adequate for laptops on the main floor and in the basement. Our old, non-smart HD TV on the main floor is connected to the HDMI output jack of a laptop which streamed Netflix to the TV. In the last few weeks, the Netflix buffering became "unbearable" so I did a few measurements. I pinged the Belkin 100 times. The result was a huge variance in ping times: an average of 62 ms with a huge variance, a low of 1 ms and a high of 298 ms. In addition there was 3% packet loss. When I connected the laptop directly to the Belkin using a wired (Ethernet) connection, the result was no variance, an average of 0.3 ms, and 0% packet loss. So one solution seemed to be to connect the laptop to a wired, rather than wireless, connection. In my old, non-smart house, installing an Ethernet cable from the second to the first floors would have cost $300-$500. Enter the TRENDnet. I installed it as others have suggested, directly to a two-outlet wall outlet (rather than, say, a power strip). Its profile allows full three-prong usage of the remaining outlet. It worked out of the box. I didn't even need to press the sync button. Now the laptop on the main floor has a 3 ms ping to the Belkin with little variance and 0% packet loss. speedtest.net measures 15.1 Mbps. Netflix (and other video streaming) now work flawlessly. Having one TRENDnet wired to the Belkin upstairs opens other possibilities. TRENDnet claims that up to 7 such wired Ethernet ports can be created, wherever you have an electrical outlet. I may, in the future, connect a more powerful $100 WAP/router (e.g. with external antennas) to the TRENDnet on the main floor to create a 2-WAP/router home LAN and boost the wireless signal throughout the house. Of course, another solution might have been simply to install that more powerful WAP/router on the second floor but that solution would have been three times as expensive. A different solution might have been to use the coaxial cable that Time-Warner had already installed but I didn't pursue that either as I believe it's also more expensive. Right now, I couldn't be happier with the TRENDnet and recommend it as a solution to flaky wireless streaming.