Devolo dLAN 200 AVeasy Starter Kit review -- Are modern Powerline Ethernet adapters worth it?

So the other day I had to set up a little network for a friend of mine and the entry point of the ADSL line and router were located in the bottom of his house. His two PCs that needed to be connected where all the way on the second floor. Now, to create a network one can do several things. Take a long CAT5 cable, drill holes though the floors of the house and route the cabling through it. Sure, best performance... but not really sexy-looking in your spanking new remodeled house.

A second option is obviously to go wireless, but since that friend games online a lot... even with an N series wireless access point or router (IEEE 802.11n) the distance is rather far that he was bound to see some packet-loss. Now you can amplify and boost signals but things become more complicated and expensive real fast. So why not take an unusual simple route... all the man needs is an Internet connection on two PCs with fairly average speeds.

So today I wanted to take a look at Ethernet over your power line. This technology has been here for years and is as simple as can be, you utilize the power sockets in your house to transport a data signal carrying a network signal. All you need are two or more homeplug adapters, also known as Powerline Ethernet adapters.

The Powerline Ethernet adapters allow you to use your mains electricity circuit to transfer data as well as power, this way you can extend your network to wherever you have a free plug socket. In theory, the product we test today, Devolo's dLan 200 AV system, provides a connection of up to 200Mbits/sec. In practice, however, the maximum net data rate according to Devolo is likely to be between 80 and 90Mbits/sec - still that is much faster than Wi-Fi and very sufficient for streaming high-definition video from say your PC with network shares to, for instance, your HTPC.

The technology called DLAN has improved over the years and we noticed that companies like Netgear, Trust and Devolo are offering some competitive kits. Devolo is the one company that caught my attention. They offer 200 Mbit/sec adapters. You plug them in, connect one to your PC, and another one to say your internet router and you are good to go.

Easy as 1-2-3... but do these things really achieve 200 Mbit/sec transfer rates? Or is that number much inflated such as we see from Wireless where the reality that 54 Mbit/s often is 20 Mbit/sec due to error correction and encryption.

So today we'll test the Devolo dLAN 200 AVeasy starter kit, a kit that can be expanded with more than two Ethernet over power adapters to create an extensive network. Let's fire this review up and see how fast these things really are.