Customer Reviews

Cisco-Linksys PLK200 Powerline AV Ethernet Adapter Kit

5 star:		(41)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

I got this because my wireless quality has been declining steadily over time. I live in a large aparment building in New York City and as more and more of my neighbors get wireless devices my signal quality has been dropping. I stream music wirelessly using Apple AirPort and the quality became so poor that I could not listen anymore. Not wanting to run cables all over my apartment I thought I'd give this a try - but buy from Amazon since they have a good return policy in case it did not work.
I just plugged it in and it worked! Simple as that. If you have monkeyed around with wireless you'll appreciate that there is basically nothing else to this. And it is fast! I can now play my ripped music from my PC to my stereo with excellent quality - better than I ever got with wireless. Luckliy the AirPort can stream music using a LAN cable in addition to wireless.
The only hitch that I can think of maybe the wiring in your house/apartment. I was worried about mine living in a aparment building that the circuits may not be linked, but they were. I had no problems plugging in other rooms with different circuit breakers - since they are all on the same control panel. I guess it is possible that this is not always the case - depending on how your house is wired. For example, if you have combined two apartments they could be separate. But if they are then it does not get any easier or much faster than this.

Only downside is the very high price - it is way more expensive than wireless. You can buy a good wireless router for less than $50 and if you have a laptop you are done. This option costs MUCH more than that. For me it was preferable to running unsightly network cables throughout my apartment.
Another option for me could have been trying an 802.11n wireless to see if the signal was better. But since that is not yet a published industry standard, each vendor (DLink, Linksys etc) has they own flavor of it and so they are unlikely to work together well. So I'd probably have to completely retool my existing wireless which may be no better and may have the same problem with interference when my neighbors all move to it in a few years anyway. So I gave this a shot and I could not be happier.

Finally a company has come out with powerline networking that can handle High Definition video. I tried the Netgear HD powerline kit and it was too slow for HD. With this kit I get much better speeds and I can actually watch HD video. I have this connecting rooms on different floors on the opposite sides of my house. The included linksys utility is horrible looking and didn't work with Windows XP x64, but you only need it for the first setup. It reports connection speeds at 120Mb. Actual throughput for me is around 40Mb.

I got these, plugged one in the same room as my router, and the other all the way across my house next to my XBox 360. No setup needed, just plugged in the ethernet cables, and I was good to go. I can stream high quality video all the way across the house with no problems. I haven't had to touch these since I plugged them in. It just doesn't get any better or easier.

I just got these adapters because my wireless connection would just never be stable because of the house layout. They seem to be working fine for me but the configuration utility they give you just presents a grabled screen. The setup wizard was also bad and did not present clean screens. I had a live chat with a support person who said they had no known problems with the utility but they also did not have a current version on their website. If you need to do any configuration you are either going to have to be good at guessing or you or out of luck. I tried on two different XP systems with all the latest fixes and they both had the same problems. Hard to figure they did much real world testing.

I wanted to buy the Netgear 85 mps product but it was not on the store shelf. I also preferred the Netgear vs the Linksys as there were few reviews on the Linksys. But, what the heck, the Linksys product was there and the Netgear was not.

It worked out of the box, is located a floor and hundreds of feet from my cable modem. I am getting speeds equal to my cable model (13.5 mps) so I don't know if it can go faster.

The only glitch is I am running this of an Airport Extreme wireless router and I have had to turn my WEP security off. Not sure if it is an Airport issue but know that I have an Apple/Linksys issue and neither help desk can give me advice.

Save your money if your wireless router can reach all of your house....don't hard wire your house, this product works. I will buy more.

I tried this product at home. After a week of use I started to run into the problem that the connection dropped frequently. Talked to Linksys support. They recommended a firmware upgrade. I managed to ruin my Linksys device while applying the firmware upgrade. Linksys support was so nice to send a free-of-charge replacement unit. However, it turned out the (refurbished) replacement unit was dead-on-arrival. Linksys support now refuses to send me a second replacement unit. I'm giving up. I did wast a lot of time with this device. I cannot recommend it to anybody.

Footnote.

Now I'm using the competing Panasonic product. This product works like a charm! It was very easy to install (no software required, just plug it in). And last but not least, it's about $40 less expensive than the Linksys product.

I ordered three sets (six PLE200's) with a little apprehension as there are a number of reviews where the reviewer had problems with the Linksys adapters working in their particular environment. I shouldn't have worried. When the product arrived, I set each one up on my laptop, plugged three of them in (one to the system router and one to each of my ReplayTV's and they worked flawlessly. Could not have been easier! Speed was more than adequate to pull video across the network from one ReplayTV to the other. Later I added in my PC that is used as a PVR running Linux and MythTV. Again, I had good speed and was able to watch video in .AVI format as well as mpeg encoded TV shows recorded by MythTV. I see when looking at the status of the units that the speed shows anywhere from 45 to 110 Mbps depending on the unit.

I just rebuilt the MythTV PC, reloading Linux and then doing 500 plus updates all over the Linksys network with excellent speed and was still able to view programs on the remote ReplayTV while the download was in progress with no stuttering or dropouts in the show.

My home is six years old. I have tried the adapters in numerous outlets around the house and have not found any where the unit failed to work.

I do believe I have one unit out of six that has failed. I need to do a little more testing on it but haven't had the time this past week. Having had to return another item to Amazon previously, I know the return and replacement will be handled effortlessly and expeditiously should it turn out to indeed have failed.

These units really do work and work well. I am pleased with networking over the power line and not having to run Cat 5 cables in the walls!

One final note, my video transfers so far has NOT included any HD but will soon. Based on the speeds I see, I don't believe there will be any problem with the units handling the additional bandwidth.

This is a great product for those who dont want the unreliability of wireless or dont get the range they need from wireless network. I have 4 of these adapters and I get great throughput, but as soon as I loaded firmware version 3.3 on all adapters from linksys site, the speeds and ranged improved considerably. I attached release notes on the new firmware.


Release Note for PLE200 - Powerline AV Ethernet Adapter

Firmware version: 3.3
Release Date: 5/30/2008

Bugs Fixed is v3.3 Release

1. There was an issue which led to hysteresis in UDP transfer rates. The
throughput rate would not recover when a source of power line impedance was removed.

2. On an AVLN that has Multiple Multicast protocols running on it, traffic is not correctly forwarded
after a node receives a Multicast Query.

3. The power line communications on an INT6000 would infrequently stop. This occurred with a
probability of approximately once per week. This is independent of traffic pattern.

4. The FW was not learning multicast addresses from a IGMP Join or Leave unless there was a
Query associated with the Join. The FW was also not adding the client to the group. This was
fixed to learn the address and add the client to the group without needing a Query.

5. In low data rate traffic at higher attenuations, the packets would not propagate along the power
line. This would happen at 60 dB or higher of attenuation with the default ping from the DOS
command line prompt.

6. QoS settings using the destination MAC address did not prioritize the traffic.

7. At higher attenuation, the throughput over power line would slowly drop off.

Firmware version: 1.4.5SP2
Release Date: 7/1/2007

1.) Initial Firmware released into production

Another reviewer mentioned the excessive brightness of the product's 3 blue LED's when the product is in a room that's supposed to be dark. If it bothers you, try covering the LED's with a strip of masking tape. That dims them nicely. Of course, electrical tape works great if you don't want to see the LED's at all.

Stand in the home networking department of any electronics store, and within minutes you will hear customers asking employees what to do about their home wireless routers not covering their whole house. The failed promise of a single wireless router to provide adequate coverage has caused different products to be marketed. The Powerline AV adapter is one such product. Plug one in to an AC outlet near your broadband router and connect an Ethernet cable to your router. Plug another in to a distant AC outlet in your home, and plug in any network device such as a computer, access point, internet camera or printer.

Overall, this product worked. Setup was not smooth, though. The setup program and instructions have a few issues. You are told to run the setup program twice, once for each adapter. However, this starts the setup wizard again, which detects that you've already installed the configuration utility, and it asks if you want to modify/remove/repair. Then it tells you that you can click on an icon to register your product. However, at that point your PC is not connected to the Internet (unless you're using a computer with both a wired and wireless connection).

Worse yet, the configuration utility did not find the Powerline adapter connected directly to it in the discovery phase. I used a second computer which had both a wired and wireless connection, and the process went smoother. The protocol used to discover the Powerline adapters was not discussed, so it's hard to say what the issue was. After connecting, I immediately updated the firmware via a download from the Linksys website. This caused the powerline connection between the two units to stop working until I connected to the other unit and also updated its firmware (I'm not surprised that the new firmware wasn't backward compatible with the old). The discovery the next time around worked much better. As another configuration must, I changed the network password from its default to discourage eavesdropping in the unlikely event that a neighbor would receive this signal over the power line and try to decode or use it.

The only other complaint so far is that these units get extremely hot. At this high heat level, I can guess that they will not last too long due to stress on the electronic components.

In summary, these are worth a shot if you don't mind spending approximately $125 for such a connection. Running dedicated Ethernet cabling is still the most reliable and certainly the cheapest method, assuming that you have access to the walls and ceiling, and the required tools and knowledge.

For setting up these devices, you might want to get a network-savvy friend to assist you to avoid any frustration. Once set up, there is no further configuration to be done.