TP-LINK TL-PA511 KIT AV500 Powerline Gigabit Adapter Starter Kit, up to 500Mbps

TP-LINK TL-PA511 KIT AV500 Powerline Gigabit Adapter Starter Kit, up to 500Mbps..

Special Price TP-LINK TL-PA511 KIT AV500 Powerline Gigabit Adapter Starter Kit, up to 500Mbps By TP-LINK

Most helpful customer reviews

130 of 133 people found the following review helpful.
Truly Plug & Play and Work Great
By IGold
This item is as described. In reading some of the other reviews, I believe the confusion is in the initial paring of the units. All I did was plug them into two different outlets in the same room (clearly they were on the same circuit) and paired them, I did not even bother to plug in any Ethernet cables. I then moved one unit near my router and the other unit to a distant bedroom, hooked up the Ethernet cables and everything worked as described. I did not use the software resource disk that came with them.

I am getting much faster speeds in the bedroom than I was with Wireless N. I changed the cables to Cat 5e and both units are humming along with green lights. I would highly recommend these to anyone with wireless issues.

Also, although they are bigger than your typical power wart, they are designed so that if you plug them into the bottom outlet of the receptacle, they do not interfere at all with top outlet, leaving it free for a power strip or UPS. This was one of the unknown concerns I had prior to purchase.

For clarification the model I am reviewing is the TL-PA511 KIT.

156 of 165 people found the following review helpful.
OMG I have internets.
By C. miller
We live in a 100 year old house with plaster walls underneath wood paneling. Pity us. Wireless will not penetrate the walls no matter how many repeaters / antennae / amps / cats with tinfoil you place. My 14 year old daughter was throwing a stereotypical teenage girl conniption fit that her wireless kept dropping out, had a 1mbps downstream, and was generally poo. After some last ditch settings adjustments I ordered these, on the advice from a popular hardware forum.
While they were a little fiddly to initially pair, once I got them installed, it was magic. Digital unicorns flew out of my daughter's Tumblr feed at the speed of 30mbps, and she no longer things I'm a moron.

In other words, works awesome.

86 of 91 people found the following review helpful.
Just As Good As The More Expensive Brands With Intercompatibility!!
By Hyoun Kim
I've been a Network Engineer for over 10 years and ever since I've dealt with computers, cabling is one of the worst aspects of the job. I can't tell you how many times I've run/extended CAT3/CAT5/CAT5e/CAT6 cabling and ended up terminating both ends and testing them. Some situations are easier than others when you're allowed to run a cable across the floor or above ceiling tile... but in other situations like getting networking in a certain room in your house can be a total pain in the butt.

For the average home user, the only way to get networking from point A to your house to point B is either wired with cabling or use WiFi & bridging if the WiFi didn't extend far enough. When Powerline technology came out it added convenience of using existing power cabling but still was a little flaky and troublesome. But since then, Powerline has jumped leaps and bounds since and is much more reliable & faster.

When it came time to buy originally back in July 2012, I put a lot of research into looking into the latest powerline solution for my home. I wanted something with high performance and the current version of "high performance Powerline devices" allows 500Mbps transfer rate. Even still, I was having trouble selecting which manufacturer to go with (Belkin, Cisco, Netgear, etc). After my homework (and despite Netgear's horrible sales support), I ended up with the NETGEAR Powerline 500Mbps Nano Adapter - Starter Kit (XAVB5101).

Despite the insane price point (currently $87.99 on Amazon - 12/13/2013; I bought these for $108 back in July 2012), the Netgear adapters worked wonderfully in my home. I was able to maintain faster throughput from device to device while on wired Ethernet while not saturating my WiFi network. However, over the course of a year and a half, the number of devices I had in my house grew considerably (especially over WiFi).

In the past year, I added a few cell phones, a laptop, a tablet, a Roku 3, a Western Digital TV Live, 2 Chromecasts, and a new Smart TV. Because of that, my WiFi started to become degraded because every single one of those new devices was connecting to my network over WiFi. When multiple devices would start streaming things like Netflix and I was doing transfers from my media server to a PC, Netflix would stutter and my WiFi throughput would literally crawl slower than a snail on a salt bed. That's when I realized I needed to invest in more Powerline Adapters for certain rooms to speed up transfers as well as help reduce the load of my WiFi network.

But you see, despite being pleased with my Netgear adapters, I didn't want to spend another $100. A friend of mine (who I told the Netgear adapters about) bought another brand of Powerline AV 500Mbit adapters from a company called TP-Link to save money. He said they worked pretty good. After finding out that they were $35 on Amazon, I immediately pulled the trigger. I mean after all, I had a word of mouth approval from a friend and you can't argue saving over $50 vs another set of my Netgear adapters... the result? Absolutely no difference in speeds.

Just like the Netgear adapters, these are essentially Plug & Play. There were literally no problems connecting these in my house. I went to the living room where I needed wired connectivity and plugged these up to the wall. The TP-Link adapter immediately recognized my existing Netgear Powerline adapters and the 2nd LED (Powerline LED indicator) immediately lit up. I plugged in my small 10/100 switch to it and then my Roku & TV up to it and the 3rd LED (Ethernet indicator) lit up and the devices could not only talk to other devices on my LAN, but they had Internet access as well. I personally noticed NO DIFFERENCE in throughput speeds both within the LAN and the Internet.

The *ONLY* difference between the TP-Link set and the Netgear is the that the TP-Link doesn't tell you the "current speed" of that adapter's Powerline network. The Netgear has multicolored LEDs that indicate the speed of your Powerline network. While this normally won't matter to a lot of people, it will tell you whether you are having degraded performance within your home's electrical wiring. It also aids in troubleshooting as well. But it's not a show stopper...

Personally, I would recommend this product over the Netgear adapters I have.
1. The price is a LOT cheaper.
2. TP-Link has a TWO YEAR WARRANTY vs the Netgear's ONE YEAR WARRANTY. If you're really concerned on whether you're buying "a crap product", rest assured that this works just as good as the bigger name brands and you have an extra year of product care!

Highly recommended.

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