Does 150 megabits per second work well with my TP-Link AV1200 and the WPA7517 adapter?
Does 150 megabits per second work well with my TP-Link AV1200 and the WPA7517 adapter?
Hello Guys, I just bought an AV1200 Powerline kit from TP-Link to fix my internet when WiFi keeps dropping and gets super slow in a room near a jail. Even though these devices are supposed to be fast, usually they only get 40% to 50% speed, but after testing for a while I got consistent speeds between 110 and 150 mbps no matter which outlets I used. I tried putting the first device on one outlet and the second device on another outlet in the same living room. It's not sure if they are on the same wire since there is only one plug left, but I think it might be because we're in the same room. The speed was exactly the same as when I put the second PC just a few meters away from the main living area. Best results were 150 mbps and bad cases were 110 mbps. Is this my best possible performance with an AV1200 device, or is it broken? Also, the TP-Link app said speeds could go up to 450-520 mbps between the two devices, but I didn't see that in my tests. Actually, even though "AV1200" sounds fast, 150 mbps is only about 12.5% of 1200. That's just normal speed for these things right? Thanks a lot for your answers For clarity: I tested using the Speedtest app and my phone on both WiFi and direct connections to the router. My internet plan is 600/100 mbps. Through WiFi I got around 420 mbps in good cases, but through a direct LAN cable to the router it was even faster with best values near 720 mbps. When my secondary PC connected directly to the router via WiFi, it had the exact same speed as the router (around 420 mbps). This proves something is wrong with the wires or the phone system itself. Thanks so much for your help!
That's what people usually expect to get out of a router or modem. Even if a device says it has a number like 2000 on the label, it rarely delivers much more than that. TPLink, for example, likes to trick you with their names. They used to call their stuff an AV-500 based on a standard called AV-500. When new types of power lines came out, they just changed the name to AV-600 even though the actual standard is actually AV-2-600 and it's not what the unit really is. They didn't change the part number either. But those units don't even get 100Mbps... kinda that's why they only have ports labeled for 100Mbps, so you know the maker knows they can never come close to the number written on the box. Even with WiFi, their claims are a bit misleading too; adding up the speeds of both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios together isn't even possible because...
That's basically what the numbers say on the box. Even if a unit costs $2000 or more, you won't see much speed increase. TP-Link loves to lie about this too. They used to call their stuff an "AV500" but when a newer powerline came out, they just changed it to "AV600" even though the real standard is AV2.6G and that's not what the unit actually does. The part number didn't change. Those units do not even get 100Mbps. That's kind of why you only see 100M ports on them; you know the maker knows they can't really come close to the numbers on the box.
WiFi is pretty deceptive too, adding up speeds from both 2.4 and 5GHz radios even though you physically can't do that at once. They'll try something dumb like that in WiFi7 later. Wait, those two technologies are actually different things. Calling an ethernet cable 2Gbit because they add transmit and receive together is wrong too; ethernet can send 1Gbit AND receive 1Gbit right now.
The only tech I know that gets closer to the truth is newer MOCA units. They can run a full 1Gbit ethernet cable on both ends at the same time if you buy the so-called 2.5G models. The important part here is: what are you actually doing with your connection? The huge bandwidths people see right now mean almost nothing for most things. Web surfing uses very little power. Streaming video like Netflix 4K might use up to 25Mbps, but only file downloads can take the full speed and it depends on how many hours a day you do that.
The main reason people use powerline over WiFi is because it's much more stable. The latency (delay) stays very consistent so online games run better.
Thanks to @bill001g For your reply With that I feel much calmer about my units since they are working perfectly without any issues. My main goal was to have a backup connection just in case my Wi-Fi goes down. This way, even if the signals get messed up by some interference, it won't break. So, their job is done and they are handling that task correctly. But here is one last question: Is there a way to combine both connections on Windows? If I can do this, then I will have the speed boost from 5G Wi-Fi when everything works smoothly, but automatically switch back to Ethernet whenever the Wi-Fi gets unstable. Normally, Windows just keeps trying to use Wi-Fi until it gives up or turns off the adapter, but is there a built-in method that manages both connections at once better? I found an online trick of putting network metrics on both devices in manual mode and setting them all to 15 Mbps, though I'm not sure if that actually works. On my task manager window, I can't see any activity for either device; it just shows zero kilobytes per second for download and upload, but the internet still connects fine 😊 So, thanks again for your help!
I don't know what happens if you set the metric number exactly the same. The MAC addresses are different, so the IP addresses probably change too. That makes it hard to move over an open game session because the router creates a new NAT entry and thinks you're a totally different machine. To fix this properly, we'd need to act more like Linux, using the loopback IP address instead of changing things around. Then the "router" would have to know that this specific IP is actually on both network paths. There isn't any simple way to do switching with wifi because it never really disconnects and unlike ethernet, you can't see error counts since wifi uses data retransmission to fix problems automatically. You'd need something special to measure average latency and check if there are sudden spikes in activity. Back when there were programs like forcebind that let different apps use separate interfaces, they didn't work well anymore because Microsoft keeps breaking them with new security patches. Now you often get things like Chrome that don't run as a single process at all. Honestly, the best way to do this is to use powerline adapters for everything and only turn off your ethernet connection when you need to download something big.