Tenda AV1000 Gigabit Powerline Adapter Review

Performance

When it comes to testing a powerline setup, there are many different factors that have to be taken into account with regards to how the system performs at different distances. Naturally the biggest player in this is going to be the wiring system in the environment where the plugs are going to be used. Older electrical systems typically should expect to have a slightly lower performance level to newer installations and then there is also the distance between the plugs – you have to remember as well that this may not be as direct as you may think as most household systems run on a ring and if you’re going between floors then this also means the signal is likely to pass through the main fuse board at some stage.

I’ve chosen three distances for my tests where the first is co-located right next to each other. The next is in my bedroom and the last is in my living room that have an estimated cable running distance of 20 and 60 meters respectively. These 3 distances and the resulting speeds should give us a good idea as to how the plugs can perform.

I’ve added the results of a direct Gigabit Ethernet connections as reference and baseline, giving a true real-world comparison between a normal wired and the Ethernet over power circuitry connections.

The Tenda AV1000 kit didn’t achieve the gigabit speeds nor did it really get close scoring about 31% of the speed. This however isn’t as bad a result as it looks at first and it’s double the speed the recently tested 500Mbit/s devices by our previous reviewer. We were promised double speeds and we got them.

While the speeds above might not be ideal for copying large amount of data in a speedy matter, they are enough to cover most people’s internet connection speeds, even on the longest distance I had in my apartment.