[section_title title=”Setup & Performance”]Setup & Performance
Setting up the Powerline 200 Mini twin pack was nothing short of a breeze; it is understandable in my eyes why it doesn’t come with a manual but if you have no idea what you are doing, you might feel a little perplexed. After connecting one of the home plugs into my router and the adjacent power socket, I then went upstairs and connected the upstairs PC to the 2nd powerline adapter. The connection took around 10 seconds to find but prior to that, I took the following reading using the 2.4GHz wireless connection. The reading was as follows:
2.4GHz WIRELESS
Ping – 28ms
D/L – 32.75Mb/s
U/L – 10.55Mb/s
Quite good considering the amount of obstacles in the premises but how did the connection fair on the Netgear Powerline 200 Mini adapters? Well the results using the adapters gave me the following:
POWERLINE 200 MINI
Ping – 13ms
D/L – 70.64Mb/s
U/L – 10.47Mb /s
Compare that with my main systems current wired connection:
WIRED DIRECTLY INTO MODEM/ROUTER
Ping – 12ms
D/L – 102.46Mb/s
U/L – 11.29Mb/s
Compared to the wireless connection, the Netgear Powerline 200 Mini set provide a near full connection in comparison and after doing some game testing while using them, I had no disconnects or lag from game servers etc.; unlike while using wireless and I would get the odd error.
With over 50% the download speed of the wireless connection and 70% of the wired connection, I would say they performed pretty well considering they are aimed towards the budget end of the scale.