Netgear XAVB5201 500Mbps Powerline Adaptor Review

I have to say that the principle of “powerlining” in the home has been sold to me a little and I can really see the benefits of doing so over having wireless/Wi-Fi or having LAN cables traipsing everywhere. No matter how far apart we set each of the adaptors, even through multiple sockets, the performance was very consistent with only a very small drop in performance found as the distance increased.

The pick-a-plug feature I found to be very useful. The traffic light system shows if a plug is suitable or not and it was only when we connected a series of extension leads together that we found the LED turning to red to show a poor connection. One part that I don’t quite get about this particular kit is the 500Mbps link between the two plugs. After all, the overall link is only going to be as fast as the slowest point, thus the bottle neck is caused by the 10/100 interface on each plug. For this reason having a 500Mbps link between the plugs is all and well, but considering this is full duplex, the maximum speed in either direction, theoretically, is 250Mbps and we’d never see that with a 10/100 connection – the speeds we recorded seemed to be optimal.

This slight downfall aside, the kit is fully backwards compatible with older kits that Netgear offer and this means that any existing Netgear powerline setups can be extended with this kit and vice versa. Even with a 10/100 interface and a throughput of around 88Mbps, streaming high definition content will be no issue if the plugs are used in a single link. If you’re looking to have multiple plugs installed and have a powerline based infrastructure, then we would recommend looking at the XAVB5101 kit instead which hosts a gigabit Ethernet adaptor to take a better advantage of the 500Mbps link speed.

Bottom line; as an entry level bit of kit, the XAVB5201 is a great starting point and is ideal for user that simply wants to use the internet and do a little bit of file sharing. Because the principle of the system has now been proven to me, I’m happy to give this kit our innovation award.