After my recent whiny post about Netgear’s confusing line of networking adapters which run over your electrical wiring, a friend this week volunteered to take my medium-speed powerline adapters off my hands. So it’s on to the grown-up stuff: the supposedly 200 megabit per second bad boys. Annoyingly, the faster version has no model with more than one ethernet port so I also had to add another switch to my office setup where a four-port 85 mbps adapter used to live.
As seen in the photo above, I’d really like to know which genius at Netgear decided that two different and (mostly) incompatible adapter lines should look identical. So identical that my new adapters had to have a small sticker affixed bragging of their 200 megabitness. I say “mostly” incompatible because even though you can’t network from an old 85 mbps adapter to a newer 200 mbps adapter, you can have both kinds running over your electrical system simultaneously. In other words, you can’t go 85 to 200, but you can go 85 to 85 and 200 to 200.
I’m also not thrilled by Netgear’s configuration software that comes bundled with the 200 mbps adapters. Called the HDX101 Configuration Utility. The program is supposed to let you set the adapters in a slower mode to avoid interfering with 85 mbps gear and also establish “quality of service” rules on your network to help, say, streaming video run faster. The program was unusable on a PC running Windows Vista as well as on my MacBook Pro running eirtehr Vista under Boot Camp or Windows 2000 Pro under Fusion. The config software only found all the new adapters when running on a PC laptop with Windows XP, and still couldn’t set one of the gizmos correctly. Oy. To be clear, you don’t need to use the config software for simple set ups — the adapters are plug and play of the box.
Using Speakeasy’s bandwidth speed tests, the new powerline adapters almost matched the speed of my N-flavored wifi. Both come out ahead of old-fashioned G-flavored wifi. Averaging several trials each on my two Macs, Powerline downloaded at 5,800 megabits per second and uploaded at 355 mbps. Wifi N downloaded at 6,200 mbps and uploaded at 358. And old, pokey wifi G still managed to download at 5,300 mbps and upload at 356. Initial speed tests today were muffed up by a Mozy operation running in the background, so I’ll update shortly. Back in February, wifi slammed powerline.
p.s. On an unrelated note, anybody know why pictures taken with Apple’s PhotoBooth program and my iMac’s built-in iSight camera come out reversed? Is there some hidden mirror setting I need to know about?
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