We just got a Devolo Powerline dLAN 1200+ Starter Kit, with the intention of replacing the rather unreliable ethernet connection to our study. We had ethernet installed when we had the whole house re-wired, but JBW didn’t know what he was doing and this particular room has always suffered from dropouts and slower speeds. (Aside - this is actually what we were left with at the patch panel – network engineers look away now:

I re-did all the panel connections, but we still ended up with one bad line with interior-grade cabling traversing the exterior of the house just high/far enough that I didn’t want to attempt replace it, and it seems to cause drop-outs for all devices on the network).

Installation of the Devolo could not have been simpler, taking about three minutes and working first time without issue; so far the connection has been completely stable.

But what about speed?  I did a quick test, copying a folder containing about 1Gigabyte of files from a local drive on the PC to a NAS drive across the network. Here’s the contents of the folder:

Here’s the result over the Devolo “1200 Mbps” connection (which translates in theory to 143MB/s!):

Average speed over the Devolo Powerline 1200+ around 8MB/s (or 67 Mbps).

And here’s the results over the (unreliable) ethernet connection:

Average speed around 11MB/s (or 92Mbps), that’s 37.5% faster.

I then tried further tests using Totusoft’s free “LAN Speed Test (Lite)” from http://totusoft.com/downloads/

Here’s the Devolo:

and here’s the Ethernet:

The results are similarly in favour of the ethernet connection. 32% faster write speed, and 14% faster read speed.

I’m a bit disappointed.

However, I did get this result a number of times with the ethernet connection – “Error reading test file” - illustrating how unreliable it has been:

Our greatest concern is stability rather than raw speed, as family members have all been going nuts with the drop-outs – I had managed to prove that whenever the line to the study failed, other devices in the house would suddenly lose their WiFi and/or ethernet and/or internet connection, for reasons I don’t fully understand. So let’s see over time whether the Powerline solution turns about to be more stable. After two hours the answer is seeming to be “yes”!