WiFi may be the most convenient way to connect and play but it’s certainly not the most reliable!; There are certain situations you find yourself in as a gamer where you just need more things cabled up! We have been kindly given the opportunity to test out and play with the TP-Link Gigabit Powerline Starter Kit. This is a piece of kit that can help you cable up more tech around the house (or office!) for a more consistent and reliable connection.
The simple way to describe how to use Powerline adapters is this: Plug in one adapter to an wall power socket near your router, attach an ethernet from your router to the adapter, plug in the other adapter in the location you want and then plug an ethernet from the adapter into the piece of tech you require wether that be a TV, smart box or console. This will give you a wired internet connection even when you aren’t near your router.
The speeds can vary generally depending on the model you have. I have a Powerline adapter set from 5 years ago that cap out around 50mbps. So when I plugged in the set sent to us by TP-LINK I would incredibly pleased to see I was getting consistent speeds of over 100mbps on my speed tests. Now the AV2000 set promises to deliver gigabit speeds but in the UK there aren’t many providers that can give that and in the area I am in 100mbps is the best I can get. I was very happy to see that I was still getting my max speeds from the adapters.
The set up was incredibly simple as well, there is a button on the adapters that you press to pair them together. That’s it. You won’t need to fiddle with any settings or have to input any information to get this to work.
My main testing was done with plugging an ethernet from the adapter into an NVIDIA Shield TV and then playing NVIDIA GeForce Now to stream PC games. This is an incredibly intensive task that over WiFi was not performing very well. With my router being near my actual PC I used the adapter to use an ethernet connection and that improved the performance massively. There wasn’t any input lag, the stuttering had gone and the quality of the image had cleared up. Using Stadia was just as impressive.
The even better aspect about all of this is that the adapters have two slots for ethernet cables so if you have it near a media set up you can connect two devices to an ethernet connection. After having spent the past 3 weeks with the Powerline kit, I have seen fantastic consistency which is the number 1 thing I look for when it comes to network connections.
They are currently up for £91.49 on Amazon.
