I tried powerline for quite some time and thought it was useful. But once I became a homeowner, I decided it was time to wire my house for ethernet. To be honest -- it's one of the smarter things I've done when it comes to networking. Not only am I getting the full bandwidth out of my cable modem subscription, but I also walked away knowing more about how my house fits together.

Since I've done that, I've been able to diagnose other problems in the house that don't have anything to do with networking. It's not that hard, and if you're not-a-renter, it's a great little project that'll give you knowledge over your house should other things go wrong.

Don't get me wrong -- powerline's great. But cat6 is greater, cheaper, easier, not mutually-exclusive, and, unlike powerline, adds value onto the house.

I don't find this result unexpected at all. In fact, ever since I had my two PLC adapters I've taken the speed as granted.

I can agree with OP about the superiority of Powerline. I've stretched them as much as running it in my old house to a cottage circa 25 meters from the router. In the cottage I've had 6 computers linked to Internet trough 3 switches, which all come down to the single PLC adapter. Latency and overall bandwidth is almost the same, whilst WiFi struggles to even reach some devices, such as phones.

For OP I would suggest trying different wall sockets as well; I've noticed that different wall sockets provide different speeds, whilst some don't even work for me.

The adapters I'am using are low tier D-Link adapters.

As a HAM radio operator, I was playing around with ethernet over powerline adapters and it caused all kinds of issues. Signal quality to many repeaters dropped, and I would get random interference when one of the computers would wake up.

Instead I just wired my whole house with Cat6 instead. Nice patch panel in the basement, and I am a happy camper.

You have to be careful with powerline, because plugging a new device into your power system may completely kill your network. When engineers design home appliances they do not assume that your power wires are used to transmit data, so their appliances can add all kinds of noise over the power wires.

For example, the inverters of solar panels are known to kill powerline networking.

If anyone is wondering what Powerline is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug

Basically IP over the same wires that you use for electricity.

Seems pretty crazy!

I've been using the older Powerline technology for a couple of years now, I think the adapter is rated 200Mb/s, but I only get about 26Mb/s on the other machine.

Anyway, the latest generation of Powerline is called G.hn: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.hn As you can see, it's targeting 1Gb/s rates, which is pretty cool!

I had to use Powerline adapters in my apartment and was skeptical because of early problems. I have been very impressed. I've had no problems. Although I don't understand why the manufacturers put 100 Mbps Ethernet on 500 Mbps adapters. Probably because 500 Mbps real world performance is closer to 100 Mbps.

I'm not surprised by this result, though mine was the exact opposite: I migrated from powerline to an 802.11ac bridge.

I'd turned to powerline a few years ago, once it became clear that, between the walls and my neighbors, I couldn't reasonably cover my apartment with only one access point. It more-or-less worked, but was pretty flaky (fluctuating speed, lots of trouble streaming video, resetting the powerline adapters and/or other devices several times a week, etc.). Eventually I started to notice patterns, like speed always dropping when we ran the washer or dryer. I ended up deciding that our apartment wiring just wasn't good enough to do powerline networking reliably (not shocking, we've had issues on other fronts).

Since I wasn't in a position to get the landlord to upgrade our wiring, I went looking for a powerline alternative. Fortunately for me, by then 802.11ac was just ready enough for me to jump onto the bleeding edge. 802.11ac has had its own issues, but I can reliably watch Netflix, Amazon and YouTube in my bedroom and that's what counts.

Microwaves run at 2.4GHz and mostly interrupt wifi in that band. This means they mostly impact b,g and n, but not a or ac. Upgrading to ac should help his wireless experience considerably.

I've actually switched from a ~200Mbps effective 450N link to 200Mbps powerline adapters which provide ~90Mbps effective.

I've been pleased with the results. It is slower for single, large data streams. However, I primarily use my home network to access a NAS, and it seems to be smoother and faster over powerline- perhaps because there are far fewer lost packets, and it is supposed to be full duplex (?) so it behaves better in a random-access situation. In theory there is also more headroom for other devices, while WiFi generally sucks up all the available spectrum for just one device.

Or he could just run some CAT-6 cable.

We live in a terraced house in the UK, and using the new Virgin SuperHub 2 and its 5.0GHz connection I can get full speed of our Internet - 125Mbps, even on my phone(HTC One). Powerline(using TP-Link 200Mbps adapters) maxes out at 80Mbps in every room of the house.

If you're thinking about doing this, make sure your 500 plug comes with a gigabit port. Some of them are only 10/100.