Trendnet Powerline 500AV2 Adapter Kit - Performance and Final Thoughts

Network Performance:

As far as performance goes, we fired up iperf to do a little benchmarking on this Powerline kit.  Iperf results show bandwidth that the network is actually capable of.  In the real world, we rarely see networking performance on wireless and Powerline hardware meet the specifications, but that's where we are able to take out the limitations of file transfers and see what the hardware is capable of.  We use iperf with confidence as it shows how good the network hardware actually is and if it can perform anywhere close to its rated specs.

This is now our fifth Powerline kit we've reviewed, and we are able to compare it to the Rosewill RPLC-500, Trendnet TPL-307E2K as well as the Linksys PLEK400 and the Trendnet TPL-401E hardware as well. We used the exact same wall receptacles at the same ranges with the same networking hardware. This is a fair 1:1 comparison and as you can see in the charts above, the performance of the Linksys kit is quite dismal and things only get better from there.

Using a multi-threaded iPerf instance we managed to squeeze out an average of over 92Mbps with a ping of 3ms within the same room. This drops of course with greater range, but the long-range tests of this kit absolutely dominate any of the competition - including earlier Trendnet hardware. I'm not sure what they've done to push the performance out as far as they did, but a Powerline kit with this kind of range is fantastic.

Final Thoughts:

The Trendnet TPL-408E2K Kit is the third kit from Trendnet that I've looked at and it was a lot more impressive than I expected for a kit that still maintains the "500" series in the title. Still, Powerline networking suffers from specifications that don't line up much with the real world - but we're seeing more of that with crazy-fast wireless kits claiming 2400Mbps and 3200Mbps. What impresses me with this kit is the speed at which it operated at some pretty impressive distances.

The performance on this 600Mbps kit isn't all that much better than the performance of the 500Mbps kit we looked at in the past. We used the same testing setup and distances from ideal to extreme. The good news is that this kit is indeed faster than the previous kit and it absolutely destroys the Linksys kit we looked at a while back.

The included cables were appreciated and are just the right length to hook to the devices that you've plugged in behind your TV. In some cases, a longer cable might indeed be nice, but for most instances and situations, the cables work well. The rest of the installation is a snap as well and everything just simply works out of the box - like it should. This is how hardware is supposed to work.

This hardware is very affordable and if you are having some challenges running a wireless network or you simply want wires, make sure you check out this kit as it comes in under $50. It tops the performance numbers at this point for any Powerline kit we've seen and we expect things to continue to get better. Even with extreme ranges, the performance was still very good at almost 40Mbps - the closest that any competitor has come is a meager 4.4Mbps. This is a great improvement for those challenging installs.

• Super simple to install
• No wireless interference
• Decent performance
• Range is great!

• Doesn't reach close to rated speed or range
• Hogs a power outlet - unlike the TPL-307E2K product