You aren’t restricted to one manufacturer, either, as any other HomePlug compliant powerline adapter should, in theory, work in the network. Your Powerline Network is now fully operational.īoth adapters in this kit are HomePlug compliant which means you can easily add additional adapters to your network. Literally, within about 5 seconds the Powerline LED on the side will stop flashing and that is it. Press the pair button on the first device, then run like crazy (well maybe not too crazy as you do have 2 minutes to do this) to the second device and press the pair button on that. Then plug the second adapter into a socket of your choosing. You simply plug one adapter into a socket near your router and connect via the supplied Ethernet cable. It takes very little effort to setup and no technical knowledge whatsoever is required. We’ve said this before and we will probably say it again, but Powerline Adapters are one of the easiest devices you could ever wish to install. The Power LED indicates if the device is on or pairing, a Powerline LED to show the network is working and will illuminate green or red depending on the quality of the connection and, finally, the Ethernet LED which illuminates when a device is connected to at least one of the two Ethernet ports. The LED lights follow a similar theme as seen before, although the lights themselves have been moved to the side. The adapters are fairly chunky but will still fit in a double wall outlet without upsetting a neighbouring socket. These do add a premium cost to adapters but in our eyes is a must have feature as it saves having to sacrifice a much needed socket. So close, but yet so far.īoth adapters in the kit are identical and again feature the excellent AC Pass-through feature. The UK version still has the top mounted ports which doesn’t look great with cables poking out. For a brief moment prior to receiving these we had been informed that, finally, the Ethernet ports were coming out of the bottom, alas this was not that case as it was the US version that has this.
Only two Gigabit Ethernet ports per adapter here, which is a bit of shame given the 8030P kit had three per adapter. They use a nice round-edged white hard plastic shell, fairly modern in design and one that would sit unobtrusively wherever you wish to place it.
The PA9020P pair of adapters use the same overall design that we have seen in their latest crop of adapters such as the PA8030P. Read on to see how it performs in our tests… Whilst quite a chunk more expensive that their PA8030P set we reviewed back in March, it does promise much faster speeds. We haven’t added a zero in there, it is really 2000Mbps. As you can probably guess from that AV number, TP-LINK has rated these as Homeplug AV2 2000Mbps. For £110 as at the time of writing (August 2016) you get a pair of AV2000 adapters both with AC Pass-through and 2 x Gigabit Ethernet ports each.
Our latest Powerline Adapter for review, the TL-PA9020P KIT from TP-LINK doesn’t just push the number even further into the realms of ridiculousness, it knocks it completely out of the ball park. As you can see the best speeds you will get are often a third, at best, of that big shiny number on the box.
Right from the early days of the 200Mbps adapters where you only got 50Mbps, then moving on to 500Mbps which could give you 150Mbps and then the latest 1200Mbps which gave us over 430Mbps in our tests. The Powerline Adapter world has long been plagued with a system of rating the link rate with a number that may mean something in the lab but to a user it is completely meaningless. 1200Mbps powerline adaptors when at best you might get 400Mbps. ‘Up to’ 50 Mbps broadband for example when you only get 10. There is a point when numbers become meaningless.