I've spent far too much money over the last few years on Wireless Routers & wi-fi cards up to and including Dual band Wireless-N.. each one promising far more than they actually deliver in real life, not one of them working reliably enough to perform the basic task of streaming a movie from a NAS in another room to a media center connected to the TV in the lounge. So when it came to looking at Powerline, i looked in detail at the reviews and experiences of other people, these were mixed ranging from good to awful, so i waited.
I saw that this is now 500mbps Powerline and i thought it might be worth taking the plunge and purchased the XAVB5004 along with a set of the XAVB5501 Powerline adapters...
After getting them home, i plugged in the XAVB5004 to the power supply in the lounge at the back of the TV and using ethernet cables, connected it to my TV, my Dreambox and my Windows media center. In another room, i plugged the homeplug adapter into the power supply and connected it by ethernet cable to my gigabit switch.
I then used one of the adapters from the XAVB5501 package and plugged it into the power supply in my bedroom and connected it by ethernet cable to my media center in my bedroom. I quickly skipped round the house pressing the security button on each adapter (within 2 minutes) and voila.... everything worked first time out of the box within the space of around 2 minutes!!!
I tested by streaming a movie from my Network Attached Storage Device to my windows media center in the lounge. I chose something very taxing: A Matroska (MKV) file containing uncompressed H.264 1080p and DTS HD video/audio streams taken from my Bluray "AVATAR directors special edition". The filesize was 32gb in size. The result was perfect streaming, no stutter, nothing you could shake a stick at. So i upped the ante... i decided to stream the same movie simultaneously to the media center in the lounge and the bedroom... again... the same result on both devices simultaneously. Last part of my test was to repeat my second test (two simultaneous streams of AVATAR) whilst BBC HD was being streamed on the TV... again everything worked without hitch.
I was elated by this, everything finally works without wires everywhere and now i can do what Netgear told me i could do with all the Wireless-N gear i had bought in the past (but never actually worked properly). I just wished these were available 3 years ago and i would have avoided spending hundreds of pounds on crummy Wireless-N.
Hats off to Netgear, these products actually do what they claim.
What is also surprising is that they work perfectly even when connected into powerstrips.. Netgear recommend that you don't do that, but i found it has absolutely no negative effect on performance whatsoever.
Both the XAVB5004 and the XAVB5501 get a 5 star rating from me and are highly recommended.