Most impressive performance
While Wi-Fi hardware vendors continue to make bold claims about ever-increasing speeds of wireless connectivity, a rival method of setting up a SOHO network has continued to quietly evolve in the background. Ethernet over Power, or EoP for short, uses your home or o€ffice’s electrical wiring to deliver data between two power points. In the early days of EoP, reliability and performance were both extremely lacking, but these issues have long since been solved. D-Link’s newest EoP kit is a prime example of how far the technology has come, promising to deliver Gigabit speeds if your home’s wiring is good enough.
Many devices claim to be plug and play, but none are truly as easy as this kit. Two adaptors are included, and it’s simply a matter of plugging them into the two power points that you want joined by a network. There’s one issue though, in that both power points must be on the same circuit. That means that both power points are connected via a power line, and an easy way to test is via your circuit-breaker box. Flick each switch one at a time until you find the one that is connected to the power points. If both stop working when a single circuit breaker is deactivated, it means they’re both on the same circuit. However, if one stops working while the other remains live, they’re on di‹erent circuits, and the kit won’t work.
If both power points are on the same circuit, all three diagnostic LEDs on the adaptors will light up. Figuring out what each light means isn’t easy though, as there’s no manual in the box other than a cryptic sheet with weird diagrams. It’d be nice if D-Link included a few pages explaining what each light means, and how to enable encryption over the network (this is done by pressing the button on each adaptor). One issue we have with installing the adaptors is their large size. When installed on a power point with two outlets, they’re so large that they effectively block out the second power point – it’d be nice if they were angled sideways instead of upwards, or came with a small extension cable. There’s also no pass-through port so you can still use the power point, a feature which is becoming more common on competing adaptors.
Once the two adaptors are in place, they should synchronise within 120 seconds. Just like with Wi-Fi, EoP performance varies wildly depending on their environment. Factors such as distance, line quality and interference can all impact the throughput of this kit, but D-Link claims it’ll deliver Gigabit speeds in the best conditions. In fact, they claim it’ll handle 2000Mbit/sec, the fastest EoP kit on the market. However, it uses the AV2 standard, which is only rated up to 1500Mbit/sec, so this claim is a little dodgey.
We tested this kit in a recently renovated worker’s cottage in the Melbourne inner-city suburb of Brunswick, which had been rewired just 12 months ago. Using the excellent LAN Speed Test application, we measured the throughput when transferring a 1GB file. Over three tests we averaged a speed of 421 Mbps, which is an excellent result. Obviously it’s not as fast as dedicated Ethernet cables, but installation is a heck of a lot simpler.
However, D-Link isn’t the only maker of AV2 EoP kits, and our concerns with the form factor make it one of the least usable. It’s also one of the more expensive kits on the market, a fact which is o‹ set by its excellent performance. If D-Link can improve the size and design of the adaptors it’ll be a killer kit, but it’s already one of the fastest kits on the market. Bennett Ring
KEY SPECS
PowerLine AV2 2000 technology • 1 x Ethernet port per Adaptor • D-Link Green Power Saving