Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Whereas this ZyXEL PLA5456 HomePlug AV2 MIMO powerline adapter is easy to use and one of the very fastest available as of this date (April 2016), a strong caveat should be thrown in to temper expectations: While it is one of the fastest available, you will never get the throughput specified on any powerline adapter. It is the nature of the industry ATM, unfortunately. In the professional testing that led me to this product it was one of the fastest of any powerline adapter, but their testing topped out at 350 Mbits/sec in their lab, not the 1800 Mbps advertised. This was not an issue to me, as it was still one of the fastest I can currently buy, and I still have a slower 100 Mbit network at home. In my testing, I found two adapters plugged back-to-back into each other topped out at about 290 Mbits/sec. That was through no home wiring, but exposed to whatever noise was on my power lines. The two computers I used for my throughput test were capable of talking to each other at 940 Mbits/sec (almost a gigabit) when connected directly to one another. So the bottleneck was definitely the capability of the adapters. In my testing I found several other things you should watch out for that can affect performance: * Adding an UNsuppressed 3-outlet power tap to space the powerline adapter (PLA) out from the wall: minus 5-9 Mbps, or minus 2-4%. * Plugging a suppressed outlet strip into the PLA (not the other way around, which is strongly discouraged!): -11 Mbps, or -4%. * Plugging a noisy Halogen lamp into the same dual wall outlet as the PLA: minus 16-42 Mbps, or minus 7-18% (dimming increased the interference). * Moving the PLA from the same circuit breaker to another in an outlet on the far side of the house: -150 Mbps, or -52%. It should be noted that moving the router's PLA to a wall outlet on another circuit breaker in the same room reduced the deviation to the remote outlet by only -11 Mbits, or -4%. Much better than the -150 Mbps/-52% shown above. So by all means if you are doing speed testing, try other outlets near your start and end destinations if any are within reach. Also, while plugging a suppressed power strip into a PLA appeared to reduce the throughput as shown above, plugging a UPS into one appeared to improve it by 10 Mbps or 7%. So your personal environment will be very important to the performance of the adapter. As I believe the adapter is always encrypted, I did not see any significant difference between the default just-plug-in-in-and use it configuration and using the encrypt keys on both units. I used iPerf on Mac OSX to perform the throughput testing. So in summary, while they don't live up to their advertising hype in the real world (or even a lab!), this adapter is still one of the very fastest made at the moment, and in all cases exceeded my 100 Mbps home network and 802.11g wireless. I use it across circuit breakers to the far side of my house for a wired-only PTZ network camera. Hope this is of use!