NETGEAR Powerline Adapter + Wireless Access Point Kit (PLW1000-100NAS)

I would advise you find a different powerline adapter if you are looking for one with Wifi.

Got this last year for an outside building/room we have in the backyard that does not have internet. The in-home wifi barely reaches out there and is very spotty. Wifi-extenders never worked no matter where we put them, and I had a good experience with an older Cisco powerline adapter that helped fill a wifi-gap I had at another location.

The Cisco adapter was the only thing that could get consistent wifi to the location for a reasonably cheap price, though it was quite slow. I was interested in giving it another shot with the newer technology that claims to be faster/more reliable than when powerline adapters were first introduced, and this Netgear was an attractive option at $80.

To start, it worked fine. The setup was similar to my previous experience: plug one near the modem/router and the other in an outlet at the target location, and don’t use extension cords/power strips. I did test to see if this new one was better about going into power strips, but it was not. I guess the entire point is reaching a target far away where any reduction in signal loss is necessary for consistent communication. Once I had both plugged directly into outlets, it worked as intended.

The speed was also better than the older Cisco. Maybe newer powerline communication tech, or just having an updated wifi standard (old Cisco was 802.11 N standard). Either way, with a 500 Mbps service, the Netgear was able to get about 40 Mbps in the target room on 5G signal, a notable improvement compared to 3-10 Mbps with old Cisco years ago.

It was great for about 4.5-5 months. Sometime late last year or early this year (I don’t remember exactly, just remember noting it was only 5 months after purchase), the wifi signal was gone. And when I say gone, I mean gone gone. I did troubleshooting for about 5-6 hours over 2 days trying to figure it out. The signal disappeared completely no matter what device/2.4G or 5G protocol/proximity was used, there was no indication on the unit itself, I unplugged/re-plugged it in numerous times (both units), I tried moving the unit, and did a factory reset …. it changed nothing. I also tried wiring in directly with an ethernet cord on a laptop and accessing the default gateway ip address (and also completely disconnecting our router to avoid any routing issues trying to access the powerline adapter’s gateway page). The only thing I could get to come up was some weird Netgear page that gave some message saying “login at this webaddress…” which didn’t work. So my assumption is that Netgear did not setup any sort of local configuration page/settings for the unit as you would see with any typical router/access point/extender, instead opting for a webaddress. And that the webaddress config site/tool had been discontinued.

It is important to note that the two units (the one inside the house and the one outside in the room) could still communicate with each other. I confirmed this by wiring directly into the ethernet port into a laptop and had internet access. It seems like it was the internal wireless card/chip that was completely gone. I could go spend yet more money on a new access point to wire into it, but that defeats the point of spending the extra money to buy this device over one without wifi.

Heck, I even contacted Netgear customer support and performed trouble shooting with them. I can tell you that I had already gone well beyond what they were willing to assist with, but tried everything they said anyway. Nothing brought it back. You can guess what they said when I asked for replacement unit of a device I purchased only 5 months ago…. “it’s out of warranty, we can’t help you”. What a crock of a company.

I used to love Netgear products. They were a high-quality, reliable manufacturer of networking devices. They are a shadow of their former selves, much like most of the companies out there today. Did I expect this device to last forever given today’s manufacturing targeting service life to only outlive the “warranty” offered? No. Did I expect this device to last as long as my previous Cisco device did (ie, 4-5 years)? No. Did I even expect the thing to last 2 years? Getting closer.

But did I expect it to last longer than 5 months? Absolutely.

Don’t buy this device, even second-hand, and don’t rely on any good experience you may have had with Netgear in the past. They are no longer who they were.

Once device was put in my basement and the other in a free-standing garage about 50′ from the back of my house. I had a WiFi AP (a Plume pod device) there, but its reception was weak. After installing these devices, I saw a ~20x improvement in download speed, a 4-5x improvement in upload speed, and a ~90x reduction in latency. While the download speed improvement tops out at around 120Mbps for me, that is a vast improvement over previous performance. Given how old some of my house’s electrical wiring is, I’m very pleased with the improvement in performance.

El equipo ha funcionado correctamente y sin problemas

Works great

These work great, simple setup and integrates seamlessly with existing wifi.