Review on 💻 NETGEAR XAVB5004: Powerline 500 Mbps Network Adapter Kit with 4 Ports – Enhanced Connectivity Solution by James Lesley

I live in a two storey house that was built in 2005 and was purchased in 2009 by the original owners. You would think that was stupid#$@! Those who built my unit would have built Cat5 cables into the walls as standard early 21st century equipment, but they would have been wrong. After moving in, I bought some great Netgear AV-200 powerline products so I could use standard electrical wires in my walls to transmit information. I had a dual-band wireless router upstairs and I ran the cable to an AV-200 Ultra adapter in a nearby outlet and then to a four-port entertainment hub in a downstairs outlet. I've had great results, typically running at around 9Mbps over the power lines (which is fine because I could stream a hi-res 3D movie with Vudu for example, but I couldn't stream something like DTS Master Audio (which goes up on 24 Mbps since it is lossless) or Dolby TrueHD (which requires 18 Mbps)). In late 2011, I traded in my AV-200 gear for the more expensive and supposedly faster AV-500 gear. At best, I'm currently receiving around 11.8 Mbps over the power lines, and most of the time I'm able to transmit around 9.8 Mbps of data. So I have two ratings for the latest Netgear Powerline products: five stars compared to point-to-point wireless access points scattered throughout the home. Netgear powerline materials really work and work well. I am very happy that I bought it and it solves my problem neatly, neatly and quickly. Compared to the older Netgear Powerline AV-200 line, two stars. There aren't many reasons to upgrade to the faster AV-500 line of equipment, and if I recall some of my work in grad school, it's because of the signal processing and electrical engineering limitations of most electrical wiring used in home construction when they pass a modulated digital signal along with a standard 60 Hertz AC current (the line's Claude Shannon entropy content can only be made so small). If you already own older AV-200 models, don't worry about the additional costs. If not, then try the AV-500 material, but the gain will be negligible.