Sitecom 500 Mbps homeplug Ethernet review -
Ping and power
What about ping times?
If you are not crazy far away from the powerline network among the adapters, your ping times will be very good. In fact awesomeness for gaming, check it out.As you can see we send data-packets to the 2nd PC and get a 2ms ping on average with no packet-loss. In setup 1 and 2 there virtually was no difference with no packet-loss or round trip times.
In the kitchen however we got an occasional timeout, especially when you enable the micro-wave (hey warm snacks during testing rule!) and also when the fridge turns on/off we could actually see a dropped data-packet.
Power Consumption
We also tested how much power the Sitecom adapter uses, and that's not bad at all. Roughly 4~5 Watts per adapter. When the network is idling, the continuous power draw is merely 3 Watt.
Ehm yeah, that should read 'power consumption' -- When the homeplug adapters are not used, they jump into a power conservation mode, lowering wattage towards 1 Watt.
The Sitecom Powerline Ethernet adapters allow you to use your mains electricity circuit to transfer data, this way you can extend your network to wherever you have a free plug socket. The product we test today comes from Sitecom, their 500 Mbps plus Homeplug. The kit provides a connection of up to 500Mbits/sec. Divide that by 8 bits and you'd in theory would be able to see transfer speeds of 62.5 Megabyte per second. In practice, however we tested the maximum net data rate is much MUCH lower, 60~100 Mbits/sec - still that is faster than Wi-Fi and sufficient fenough or streaming high-definition video from say your PC with network shares to, for instance, your HTPC.
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