The 10 gadgets you should get for Christmas - and 2009 according to Charles Arthur at the Guardian - click on Guardian Logo

An obvious comparison when investigating Home Plug devices is to compare them against traditional wifi devices. Apart from the factors such as reliability and the important point as to whether the network simply works or not (a recent survey found that 25% of home wifi users have problems with connection reliability however the same survey found that for 99% of Home Plug users their network worked first time, straight out of the box) one question is how the performance compares.

To try and answer this we decided to do a simple back-to-back speed test comparing 14Meg Home Plug, 85Meg Home Plug (called Home Plug Turbo), 200Meg Home Plug and 54Meg (11g) Wifi. The results were very interesting. For the purpose of the experiment we did a simple test involving transferring a 25MegaByte file between a server and a windows PC. In this way we would try to emulate a typical working network test. To be fair all round the mains used for the Home Plug devices was clean and the Home Plug adapters were plugged directly into ring main sockets (not extensions). The wifi devices were Senao Prism chipset parts next to each other on the same desk - the wifi signal was excellent.

These were the results:

PL14 - 14Meg Home Plug adapter: 7.5Mb/s
PL85 - 85Meg Home Plug Turbo adapter: 25Mb/s
PL200AV - 200Meg Home Plug adapter: 40Mb/s
54g Wifi - 14Mb/s

Interesting yes?! So this shows that 54g wifi was a long way from 54Meg performance even with a perfect wifi signal! When we moved one of the radio devices into the next room the wifi speed went down by over 30%! It also shows that Home Plug turbo is at least as good as perfect 11g wifi and, in our test, was actually nearly twice as fast. It also shows that 14Meg Home Plug is really quite good and certainly up to the task of most home/SOHO tasks such as shared internet access and simple file sharing between PC's. In fact I would guess that 14Meg Home Plug is perfectly adequate for 90% of home users that simple want to distribute internet access and, for those users, I would say that Home Plug Turbo is not worth the extra cost. The new 200Meg (AV) units are blindingly fast and, in our own tests, we were of the opinion that the measured performance might have been distorted to some extent by the PC's involved i.e. the PC's couldn't shift the data fast enough to keep up with the adapters! Something for the speed freaks to consider but way outside the requirements for the average home or office setup.

Solwise customer, Keith Robinson, bought the PL-85's and liked them so much he put them in his company's staff magazine, read his write up here (pdf)