TP Link Update

One of my original TP Link ethernet over power adaptors has given up the ghost.  It is completely non responsive.  The others two remain fine but it's a bit of a pain as I wanted to try a third to connect with one of the upstairs bedrooms which has rather inconsistent wi-fi reception.  Since the budget won't stretch to upping the throughput to the next level I'm just going to pick up another two pack (with the new smaller design) and see how that goes.

More Ethernet over Power

Since the first pair of TP Link Powerlink adapters had proved successful I decided to add a third to feed the new kitchen PC (more of that later).

I picked up another single adapter from Amazon and it arrived quickly and set up was an absolute breeze.  Just plug the adapter into a vacant 3 pin socket, plug in the supplied ethernet cable and push the sync button for a couple of seconds on the new adapter and do the same for one of the existing ones.  Hey presto all works.

It's still not as fast as full blown ethernet but it has improved the video streaming quality and reliability significantly - plus it's much easier to chuck files around the network.

Ethernet over Power

For some reason I can't manage to pin down my wifi router will not operate at 802.11n - it always finds some reason to drop down to b/g instead.  This makes moving big files around a really slow process.

Not having ethernet cabling in our new house means I had one of four choices: (1) put up with slow wifi (frustrating but cheap), (2) buy a new wifi router (more expense and not guaranteed to fix the problem), (3) install ethernet cabling (not very straightforward and so probably rather expensive), or (4) try ethernet over my mains cabling.

I plumped for option (4) and picked up a set of TP-Link powerline adapters from Amazon.

They arrived today, came with a couple of short but useful ethernet cables and were an absolute breeze to set up.  Obviously they're not as fast as proper ethernet but it's a significant improvement in both speed and reliability.