Pros: Instant connection.

Security button works flawlessly.

See other thoughts

Cons: Never reached better than 20MB/s speeds, USB 2.0 can do better.

See other thoughts.

Other Thoughts: NewEgg has sent me maybe a dozen Power-line Adapters to play with and review, most do far better.

I have found that even if they are not plugged into a power strip or UPS if there is one on the same circuit in the house it can affect them greatly, and I took the precautions . With these I even took the extra effort and broke out my Utility extension cord with multiple plugins at the end. That was were I achieved 20MB/s. Threw my house I can normally get very descent speeds with power-line adapters, just not these ones I guess.

Before the firmware update it was far worst, but the update made them far more usable, and a lot more reliable. Just not any faster.

Pros: Cheap - $20

Cons: Plugged into two circuits and it appeared to work fine. After about a week or two, connection light goes from "green" to "yellow" - sometimes "red".

Eventually units will de-sync requiring device end to be rebooted. Average time between reboots: 2 weeks.

Manufacturer Response:

I'm sorry to hear you are having issues with your PLA5206KIT. Based on the description of the problem, I'd like to suggest you upgrade the units to the latest version of the firmware. The upgrade tool can be downloaded from our website here:
ftp://ftp.us.zyxel.com/PLA5206/software/
The latest version is 1.0.2.15.0306. You will need to upgrade both units.
If that doesn't work, or you need help going through the upgrade process, please contact our phone support. 1-800-255-4101 option #5

Pros: The same as WyFi
I have 50Mbs wired WyFi 20Mbs Att u-verse
When they are plod in a strip to gather 24Mbs 3 rooms 20Mbs

Cons: I expected 40Mbs or more
same as my WyFi

Pros: It connected.

Cons: Includes Cat 5 cab.es instead of 5e or even 6. Slow even with Cat 6. (Could be my wiring)

Other Thoughts: With the included cat 5 cable I got about 8.5 MB/s. Lucky me I had some cat 6 cables laying around, which maybe doubled the speed. Can't really say if this product is garbage or if my power lines are garbage but they should have at least included cat 5e cables. Like for real? You include ancient Ethernet cables with something that's suppose to be rated at 1000mb/s ~ 125 MB/s??

Pros: Super quick to sync/connect a pair of units.
Super price in a BF deal.

Cons: Super slow speeds. I got these to "upgrade" four-port AV500 units. I typically run three units in tandem. For my test, I only ran two to minimize network "congestion". One was at the outlet near my router/cable modem, the other was two floors down in my man cave. With the AV500 units, I was getting mid-to-upper 30's for download speeds. With these units, I was getting mostly high-teens. So much for being "twice as fast" (not that I was expecting that). I would have been happy with 50 Mbps to my man cave (since it's on a breaker sub-panel box) as it would have been a noticeable improvement on what I was using. But why pay to downgrade and lose three ports in the process? Sending them back.

Other Thoughts: I'm a digital channel manager for a website and am familiar with internet / networking technologies and have used powerline adapters for years.

Pros: It achieves 200Mbps when it worked.

Cons: Cannot configure through computer (manually).
Lost pairing after few months of use and it's unable to "pair" again.

Other Thoughts: When I did manual configure, it couldn't be done even with the PC software from support site. So I have to use a trick pairing with another pre-configured adapter to pair (I have 5 adapters at home).
After few months of use, I notify some devices couldn't connect and I realized the center light went out (lost pairing). Unfortunately, when I tried to pair again using same trick, it doesn't work anymore even they can't connect each other.

Pros: - Relatively Cheap

Cons: - Slow
- Unreliable
- Software is broken not only visually but physically (Doesn't let me change settings for the PLA.

Other Thoughts: It is worth noting that the "1000 Mbps" is a theoretical maximum (i.e. In a perfect system with no electrical interference) and it is much more common to have lower speeds. That being said I routinely find myself getting 0-10Mbps with these PLAs.

I have a set of PLA Adapters (Non-ZyXEL) rated at 500Mbps and they outperform these (By a large margin). Add to that the fact that the aforementioned set of PLAs are reliable while the 1000 Mbps ZyXEL adapters are not and you have an obvious issue. The distance between the two PLAs is less than 50ft and yet the PLAs show abysmal performance rates.

- The PLAs are plugged directly into the wall (No extension cords, Surge protectors, etc.)
- The same Cat 5e cables were used to test both sets of PLAs.
- I followed the setup exactly (Forming a home network) and the ZyXEL PLAs simply do not work as well as the others.

The terrible quality of the software (Screenshot available for those interested) combined with the terrible performance of the hardware is a clear sign of poor quality control.

ZyXEL has delivered to me a bad product and I will never buy from them again.

Pros: They work

Cons: They perform *worse* than the "slower" set of adapters they were intended to replace.

Other Thoughts: My old set of adapters are the ZyXEL PLA5215, which are AV2 SISO-500 devices. I bought these adapters specifically because they support the AV2 SISO-750 profile (I live in an older home with very few grounded outlets, so I can't take advantage of the newer AV2 MIMO adapters). I figured that the extra RF bandwidth provided by the SISO-750 adapters would give me a boost in throughput versus my older SISO-500 set.

I was dismayed, however, to find that under the same network conditions (the new adapters plugged into the same outlets that my old adapters were plugged into), the PLA5206 adapters performed *worse* than my current set! I would expect that the worst-case scenario for the new adapters would be no improvement over the old set of adapters, implying that the extra bandwidth provided in the SISO-750 profile can't be used in my particular situation. Why these new adapters perform *worse* than my old ones is a mystery to me.

Who knows, maybe the performance difference can be chalked up to the different chipsets used (Broadcom in the PLA5206, Qualcomm-Atheros in my older PLA5215's). Perhaps Qualcomm-Atheros makes better HomePlug products than Broadcom.

RMA'ed.

Pros: It's easier to set up than it is to walk up to the fridge and opening it.
Cannot stress, again, how easy this is. It should not even come with instructions.
The wireless speed with the ISP provided router is not even half of what this gives, and it is quite a big space to cover. Would have not thought to buy a couple of these before receiving this review sample, but I now keep recommending them for those dead spots around the house. Do not understand why someone would pay more for wireless extenders that don't match this speed and coverage. Hooked this right up to a 1Gbps switch and off we went with all the computers and devices in the downstairs game room.
If you can turn on a phone and plug it in to charge, you can set this up, hassle-free. Besides providing an almost flawless connection, and telling you exactly what range of speeds you are getting (with built-in indicator), they look nice enough to be out in the open

Cons: Expected slightly higher speed, and I would like the users to be informed that they will not see 100% of the speed they get when wired directly next to the router/modem. It might be unrealistic to expect better, but I would hope a kit of these (at this price) would do the trick.

Pros: The biggest benefit to this adapter is the ability to run a wired connection to your network across a run/to a room that you don't want to run ethernet.

Other than that, there are not very many benefits.

Cons: To start it did not work to replace my current setup w/out many hassles.

To be fair to the unit, it's an atypical setup, I run a TPLink tl-pa4010 (500mbps) through an extension cord (no other devices on the cord, or the outlet) on the other side I run a line out into a Netgear GS108 switch, and that runs to my HPTC (home theater pc), roku, ps3, NTV550, two cameras, and my receiver.

After swapping out the adapters I was unable to get a single connection to my network. I did the sync, it showed 3 green lights, I power cycled the switch (at most what I typically have to do) and still no network. The devices were not able to obtain any IP, it was as if they were not connected at all to my network. I tried to remove my switch and connect only to my HPTC, still nothing.

I'm not sure why the extension cord would have prevented it from working, but for whatever reason it didn't work. I have used 4 other powerline adapters from this extension cord/setup and none have had issues.

I swapped the extension cord for a longer ethernet run and was able to get a connection, but not to my GS108, only to my HTPC alone. I tried to swap out 4 additional switches & none worked (GS105, GS116e, LGS308P, tl-sg1008). The most interesting part was that in each device, they all had gigabit connection indicators.

So in my opinion I would have returned the device and should not have had to even try so many different iterations of connection.

To the HTPC I was connected from one single outlet to another single outlet w/ 3 devices plugged in, in addition to the other adapter.

The average connection speed I obtained was less than that which I typically receive with my AV500 devices (TPLink tl-pa4010 and tl-wpa4220). It was barely faster than the 200mbps Netgear and Trendnet adapters I used to use (xavb1301 and tpl-306e/a respectively). I used the same connection for the netgear, but the trendnet was actually to a further away location for this comparison. In addition, the two devices actually went through the extension cord too.

Overall, I felt that not only did the device perform well below it's stated speeds, but in addition, it was essentially not useable for anyone that doesn't want to just run an internet line to a single device.

In addition, to further substantiate that the PC was connecting at the claimed 140mbps, I was unable to stream any bluray mkv rips without extreme stuttering, this is from a dedicated file server.

Overall, i'd recommend that people just tap into their wifi over a device like this, considering that you can spend far less & get far better results. If you really need to go wired to a device you can get any number of wifi access points that'll output an ethernet connection.