NETGEARPowerline Adapter + Wireless Access Point Kit, 1000 Mbps Wall-Plug, 1 Gigabit Ethernet Ports (PLW1000-100NAS), 1 Gbps Kit - Wireless

The Problem: I live in a Victorian row home, not designed for the internet era. Walls are plaster and lathe and, basically, the worst for wifi reception. Our main cable modem and router is on the 2nd floor, in the corner of the house where it's connected to various backup drives, a "smart" television, Apple TV, etc. We get 150Mbps peak internet speeds on the 2nd floor, both wired and wireless thanks to an Airport Extreme 802.11n/ac router. Wifi reception on the 1st floor of the home is pathetic - in the range of 5Mbps (!), despite using an Apple Airport Express 802.11n router in "extend network" mode. I also use the Airport Express to stream music to a small amp and bookshelf speaker setup. Before purchasing the Netgear PLP1200, I would routinely have dropouts and stuttering in my streaming music and nearly unusable wifi reception on the 1st floor.I've been wanting to fix our 1st floor wireless reception for the past few years. I considered many options: running CAT5 cable to the 1st floor, moving the router to our master bathroom, to moving the Airport Express to our kitchen. None of these were particularly appealing options. Recently, I ran across this device and a blog post describing the virtues of Powerline ethernet extenders.Pros: Powerline extenders use existing power wiring in your house to transmit signal. No muss, no fuss. Powerline is full duplex, so potentially much faster than a wireless extender, which is half-duplex and which - by definition - drops the speed of the internet connection by 50%. The newest generation of these devices are basically plug-and-play. The PLP1200 has one-click configuration (not including reconfiguration of my Airport Express to make it a wireless access point, which took another 20 minutes). This particular device uses the new 1200Mbps "Homeplug AV2" standard, which is much faster than the prior generations. This device also has a pass-through plug, so you won't use up an empty plug which could be used for another powered device (I use it for the Airport Express mentioned above).Cons: The signal on a Powerline extender is degraded by length of cabling (strike one) and anything that can drop the signal in between the two outlets (strike two). In my case, the two plugs on two different floors of the house pass through 2 circuit breakers in our basement (each one incurs a 20-40dB drop in signal). If they're on the same circuit, that's the best case scenario. In reality, you will never achieve the peak speeds of 1200Mbps that are advertised. Not even close. Fancy surge protectors often have circuitry that can make these unusable - recall that these transmit signal over the powerline, so things that filter out noise. So the manufacturers recommend plugging directly into the wall, not via a surge protector. The PLP1200 is among the larger Powerline extenders, partly because it has the passthrough plug. It looks tiny in the pics, but it's about the dimensions of a 12oz can of soda in height and width.My Real Life Experience: Overall, I'm very pleased with this and may play around with placement of the plug. I'm currently seeing the "Pick A Plug" LED indicator that tells you how good the signal is (VERY nice feature, by the way) go back and forth between green (link rate > 80Mbps) and red (link rate < 50 Mbps), so I might improve this by finding an outlet that's has less signal drop across the circuit breakers.Here's my internet signal speed testing, using various online speed tests in my browser:1) 2nd floor, in the same room as the wireless router: 90-150Mbps, depending on how generous my ISP is feeling that day2) 1st floor, before PLP1200 and without Airport Express: essentially zero - I can't reliably connect to wifi from here3) 1st floor, before PLP1200 and using only Airport Express in "extend network" mode: 5Mbps.4) 1st floor, after PLP1200 and using Airport Express, router mode "off" (aka "Bridge Mode"), to basically act as a wireless access point for my ethernet signal: 35 MbpsSo that's a consistent 6-fold increase in signal strength. Fast enough that I can stream 4K YouTube videos, stream music via Spotify to the Airport Express speakers without stuttering or drops. You might argue "but that's nowhere close to 150Mbps - that's still a third or fifth of your peak internet speed", and you're right, and I don't care because I avoided all kinds of hassle trying to run CAT5 cable in a 110 year old home through plaster and lathe walls. For me, that's completely worth what I paid for this device and the ease of setup.

Works as expected. My room is the furthest possible from the router, being opposite floor and corner of the house. Can game while streaming and watching videos with no lag

My subscription to AT&T fiber is at the 500 mbps level, but reception at half of my 1,500 square foot house has been poor. A cheap wifi extender hasn't been of much benefit. I have had this item (comes as a pair) for a month now and I bought another pair soon after the first purchase. They are working fine for us. We now have ethernet connections in two bedrooms where we were getting poor reception previously. I was hoping that would make wifi reception by other, smaller internet devices a little better, but I'm not so sure that it does. (It's difficult to say because dropped signals are intermittent.)My house was built in 1988. Rich in Charlotte's review from Jan. 2025 says that these items may not work with a type of circuit breaker that was adopted by the electrical code in 1999. So take that into consideration when considering this item.Some reviewers are reporting that the devices stop working after a time. We will see what happens.

If you live in a big house/apartment or you’re far away from the router, this is a perfect way to get Internet to your computer and your gaming system or your TV.

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.