Hmm…just the other day, it seemed like the installation of Netgear’s 85-megabits-per-second Powerline switches had sped up my home office link to the net. It may have been an optical illusion.
Just now, at least according to Speakeasy’s broadband speed test, my wifi download speed in my home office, which used to seem so weak, out-polls ethernet over the Powerline adapters by a huge margin. I ran the tests from both my Powerbook and iMac over wifi and Powerline on each, in reverse order, quitting Safari between each test. The results, in kilobits per second:
POWERBOOK
Powerline
2,454 kbps down, 323 kbps up
Wifi (2 to 3 bars signal strength during test)
5,320 down, 316 up
IMAC
Wifi (also 2 to 3 bars)
5,807 down, 358 up
Powerline
2,326 down, 358 up
(Remember to divide by 8 to get the sometimes quoted kiloBYTES per second, or kBps, which eventually scale up to megabytes per second. Divide by 1,024 to get megabits. Edoceo has a converter calculator here.)
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