- AV500
- 2.4 GHz (300 Mbps) + 5 GHz (433 Mbps) dual band Wi-Fi
- Wi-Fi Clone
- Wi-Fi Auto-Sync
- Out of Box Simplicity
A good device for 100Mb/s but 500 is a bold faced lie
12/18/2016
This review is from: TP-LINK TL-WPA4530 KIT AV500 Powerline ac Wi-Fi Kit
Pros:
Powerline is a technology that allows you to use your home's electrical wiring like an ethernet cable. This can save having to buy, and route, lots of ethernet cable through your home making everything exponentially easier. This system also allows you to create an additional wifi hotspot for wireless access in a room where the signal used to be weak. Large homes, old homes with walls that hate wifi, houses with many people and connected devices in them. Wanting to run your gaming system on wired internet for more reliable performance than wifi offers, and lower latency. These are all excellent reasons to purchase a device like this.
Cons:
It uses 100 mb/s ethernet ports. This to me is unacceptable. It's false advertising to call it a Powerline 500 device when it's not even theoretically capable of 500 mb/s. It should have Gigabit Ethernet ports on it, period!
Overall Review:
You should know that 5GHz will have shorter range than 2.4GHz wifi, though it will be faster. Keep that in mind when choosing which to connect to.
Now, most internet connections in America are really slow, the USA is around the 57th fastest country in the world when it comes to Internet. Yeah, that's right, we're behind several 3rd world countries. But that doesn't matter, it should still have Gb/s ports for 3 main reasons:
1. This is for a HOME NETWORK, which means regardless of internet speed, transferring files from a computer to a NAS, for instance, would be limited by this bottleneck. In fairness most NAS's don't go much above 100Mb/s but many do and more come out every day that take advantage of faster speeds. Not mention SSD NAS's are a thing. That's also only one example. It is worth noting that 100mb/s should also be plenty of speed for 1, maybe 2 people to stream HD content, like Netlix, to their tv's or PC's.
2. Internet speeds are only getting faster and even in the USA if you live in or near a major city internet speeds above 100Mb/s are getting more and more common. Google fiber is installing Gb/s internet, That giant E-tailer that starts with "A" is investing in the same thing, current ISP's are scrambling to try and stay competitive in those markets. All this means that very soon we're going to look at speeds below 1Gb/s like the stone age.
3. If you have multiple users in your house, one of the primary motivations to purchase this product, then you will saturate that 100Mb/s limit very easily, and often. If there are 4 people in your house for instance, you won't all be able to watch Netflix on your own devices without quality dropping considerably.
4.
Bottom line though, advertise a device as “500Mb/s” and it darn well better be capable of actually doing that! With only 100Mb/s ports on it, it cannot, and that is a bold faced lie.
FYI: Ethernet ports exist in speeds of 10Mb/s, 100Mb/s and 1Gb/s, 10Gb/s does exist but is still quite rare.
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