Netgear XAVB1004 review

Although the Netgear XAVB1004 HomePlug 200 AV kit looks fairly expensive on the face of it, the high price is because it includes one standard single-port HomePlug adaptor and one four-port adaptor, which looks like a miniature router. The idea here is that you connect the single-port adaptor to your router and use the four-port adaptor to connect multiple devices in another part of your home.

The adaptors come with Netgear’s branded version of the usual HomePlug monitoring utility, which allows you to see and secure all the adaptors on your HomePlug network. This is useful if you need to troubleshoot an adaptor that isn’t responding, but most users won’t ever need to use it, as your adaptors will automatically connect to each other and can be secured with 128-bit AES encryption simply by pushing the security button on each adaptor.

Each of the multiport adaptor’s four ports has a different priority level, providing an easy form of QoS. The fastest port, coloured dark green, is the highest priority, making it well suited to devices or applications that will suffer if packets are dropped, such as media streamers.

The second, light green, port has medium priority and Netgear recommends using it for games consoles or VoIP phones. The last two ports have low priority, making them best suited to connecting devices that don’t handle constant data streams, such as network printers. We used the first port when we carried out our throughtput test and saw transfer speeds of 50.4Mbit/s.

However, at £120, it’s slower, more expensive and less versatile than the Solwise Piggy6, which has three Ethernet ports, plus six power sockets.