Customer Reviews

Panasonic BL-PA100KTA Ethernet Adaptor Starter Pack Includes two HD-PLC (High Definition Power Communication)

5 star:		(63)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I researched competing products from DLink and NetGear online and read numerous reviews. Any of the HD-PLC products should perform similarly in the same situation. Before deciding on a powerline Ethernet product be sure to understand that the quality of your home wiring and the distance the signal must travel all can affect the performance of the product. Poor quality wiring or very long electrical runs may limit performance.

What I liked most about the Panasonic product is that the kit which includes two units is preconfigured, so it works right out of the box without any special configuration. I didn't have to install ANY software to get my network running. I plugged in one unit to my Internet router, and the other unit into a power outlet in a nearby office. Once I connected the Ethernet cable, I was up and running. It was really that easy.

One nice thing with this unit is that you can run a speed test from the unit itself, with the front LED's displaying the estimated network performance. This was handy as I tried different outlet combinations to acheive the best performance. As a side note, I found that plugging the "Master" unit into an outlet as close as possible to the breaker box yeilded the best results. By putting the master as close to the break box as possible (electrica wiring distance) I was able to get a much better signal. I have the master unit in a downtairs room that is about 40' from the breaker box, and the secondary unit in an upstairs office that is about 65' feet from the breaker box.

Note that any powerline Ethernet product is susceptible to interference from other devices. Pay attention to the manual regarding the types of devies that can cause interference, and avoid ever pluggint the device into a surge protector, since that will greatly limit performance.

An additional nice feature of the Panasonic unit compared with DLink and NetGear is that the unit has a power cable. This allows me to plug it into "hidden" outlets, and then place the box in an easy to reach location. Both the NetGear and DLink products are a box that plugs directly into the outlet. This makes them more difficult to access, especially if you want to look at the box to see what it is doing. I like that the Panasonic can sit nicely on the corner of my desk and I can see the lights. I also suspect that the Panasonic will operate cooler since it can be placed in locations where there is air flow all around the unit.

Performance will vary by house and situation. I have a gigabit network switch that connects my machine directly to a server. When I copy a 50 megabyte file to my server using Windows XP, it takes 8 to 9 seconds to copy a 50 megabyte file. Running the same 50 megabyte file copy to a machine on the HD-PLC network connection took about 27 seconds. This seems to be pretty good performance overall. Note that "speed test" is only as good as what is being tested. My test was a real world test under Windows XP copying a 50 megabyte ZIP file.

While this device uses its own standard, called HD-PLC, it works great! the price on amazon was amazing $46 for two! i have 9 terminals and 1 master in the house and can stream DVD (not hd!) on all floors of the house. While it may not peak faster than 54mbps wifi at 10ft; it is consistent in speed and has low ping times. The best part is the ability for the unit to adjust to signal noise without dropped connections or long ping timeouts if intereference is present. A problem with all wifi products. Also there is no configuration of wireless. The best setup is to simply use a router (say a wrt45GL with DD-WRT firmware) hooked up to the switch port. This will allow you to have wifi and power ethernet at the same time. I have tried many of these "powerline AV" units which cost $40-75 per unit and they do not perform any better. Panasonic units are very nice looking and the cord allows you to hide each terminal rather than hang it off the wall plug which is sightly.

A great unit; discounted deeply due to its non-standard format. But honestly i have a old homeplug setup (14mbps) and a wireless phone line device on the same power socket and i still am able to stream dvd bitrate without any stuttering using Samba. FTP and NFS are supremely faster than XP's SMB so you will see even faster transmission rates that with windows sharing.

My biggest gain is that i can use windows copy over a share to copy a 1GB file without ever getting the dreaded fail. This might take several hours to copy with the unit but with wifi it was a guarantee fail at somewhere during the transfer which is most frustrating. That pain is gone now!

Remember these are not surge supressors and almost every powerstrip that offers decent surge suppresion will render this type of network device useless including powerline and homeplug. The manufacturers will acknowledge that if you get hit by lightning you will probably fry anything connected directly by ethernet. The only solution is to have a UPS that has a network surge suppression system. Highly recommended to protect your pc's and switches. Remember all ethernet over power have this problem so its not just this product. Something to think about.

5 stars for performance; ease of use; scalability; and amazing amazon price.

Awesome in that every outlet in my house measures full speed. Fast enough to play flawless HDTV (via HDHomeRun device). Rated for operation using 120 and 240 volts. Most people can stop reading here.

Unfortunately, continuous stutter playing back HD-DVDs so still needs to be faster for this application. I've solved this need by using a D-Link DIR-655 Extreme N Wireless Router which provides great coverage (latest firmware) and speed.

Update 13-Oct-2007: Beware noisy devices. They can reduced bandwidth and greatly increase latency. Found a DC adapter that apparently throws off electrical noise. I unplugged it from the same socket as the Panasonic device and, as the manual seems to suggest, put it into a surge protector. That seemed to help throughput. I then cascaded another surge protector in series and that seemed to help more.

Took the units out of the box, plugged the first in upstairs and the second in the basement where Wifi access had been marginal. Worked without any additional setup and extremely fast and stable. This is on a Mac where there were few other reasonable solutions. I would highly recommend this.

After months of struggling with poor wireless connections on the far side of my house, my wife can finally enjoy a fast and reliable connection using these powerline adaptors. My experience with Panasonic products has always been very good, and this product is no exception. Installation was a snap - connect each adaptor to a wall outlet using the power cords supplied and then connect the master to a router and the second adaptor to the remote computer ethernet input (ethernet cables are not supplied, so make sure you have two on hand) and that's all there is to it. Highly recommended.

I have been using a pair of these to hook up my son's game machines to my LAN. I was sure they would cause me some kind of aggravation but to my amazement they simply worked, no issues at all. Within minutes they were up and running and have been working for nearly 1 year perfectly.

After wrestling for a week with wireless in a four story town house with lots of steel construction, including installing repeaters, this ethernet adapter solved the problem in about 10 minutes with double the very best throughput I ever achieved with the wireless. What's not to like? Nothing, as far as I can tell.

When I came across this product, I was looking to connect my DirecTV HD-DVR box (HR20-100) to my wireless network to access their "on demand" beta program. The HR20-100 offers no USB support (at least at this time) so the only option was to actually run network cable to it (not really an option due to distance) or to use a powerline adapter. DirecTV offered on their site a package of powerline adapters, but with no information about brand, so I was a bit skeptical. At the time, Amazon was offering this package at a price that was almost half of what DirecTV wanted for their package, and with positive reviews and a known name, I figured it was worth a shot.

Now I know enough about computers and my network to be prepared to tweak and reconfigure default settings to get the device to work. However, this was ready to go right out of the box, even with my non-default network settings. While both devices look exactly the same, one is labeled to be the "host" device (the one you plug into your router), while the other one is unlabeled. Plug one into the wall (power strips aren't recommended) and run network cable between the device and your router, and plug the other into the wall and run network cable between the DTV box and the other device. I'd say it took all of five minutes, and I wouldn't expect a PC novice to take longer than that either.

Even at a higher price, I would still consider this over the DirecTV offering until they eventually state who makes their product or start offering it for a discount. Highly recommended.

I just have a couple of comments.

1. As others mention, try different outlets to optimize peformance. In our office where the router is, I tried 3 different outlets - each tested only with only the unit plugged in and got varying results.

2. I found that dedicating an outlet to a unit provides the best performance. Plugging a UPS (with a computer hooked up) into the OTHER receptical hurt peformance even with unit plugged directly into outlet.

3. If using more than two units (e.g. one master, multiple slaves), the directions are not clear enough. What they want you to do is plug one slave at a time into the same outlet as the master and sync it, repeating this process for each slave. Note the master should not receive a factory reset once this process has begun.

When I discovered that Directv was offering video on demand I began looking for a way to bring broadband to myDirecTV HR21 HD DVR Satellite Receiver - (HR21700 / HR21-700)]. Certain options were out. I could not wire my Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station (Gigabit) MB053LL/A directly into my DVR. A Wi-Fi solution was possible but Directv advises against it. So I began looking for a power line ethernet adapter. My search stopped with this excellent kit.

Setup was very simple. I simply plugged a 10BASE-T connector into the airport and into the master unit (conveniently labelled by Panasonic). Then you plug the secondary unit into the DVR. Both units are plugged into the wall (hence the term "power line" ethernet adapter).

No more set up is required and I began receiving Video on Demand immediately.