Netgear XAVB5004 Powerline 4-Port AV 500 Kit for Home Theater

Forget unreliable Wi-Fi this is perfect for streaming multi HD sources
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...
Does what it says on the Tin....
I spent some considerable time reading review after review of various products yuising the same or similar chipsets and finally settled on the Netgear.

Overall Im very happy with the performance of the product. Admittedly I am on the same ring main where both units are plugged in and so Im averaging a 300Mbps-215Mbps data rate which is good enough for streaming an uncompressed .mt2s movie directly ripped onto my computer with a file size of 50GB. Various itterations of the source m2ts in H264, MPEG4, MPEG2, MKV containers played flawlessly, as expected. In summary provided that you dnt need to connect the two devices across different ring mains, the streaming performance is adequate for 1080p movie streams.

I have my TV, PS3, 3D Bluray player (all Internet enabled) connected to the hub via ethernet cable and I have one space left free for an additional device, such as an AV Receiver, due sometime in the future.

Of course, no product is perfect, and so...
Poor Performance
After some difficulty I manged to getting them working reasonably well. Something the manual doesn't seem to make you aware of is that these new XAV range of power adapters are NOT compatible with the previous HDX range. I have some HDX101 devices that worked very well (on average 110Mbps)but they will not work with the XAV range. Furthermore if you leave the HDX devices plugged in then the XAV devices will not operate properly and you will see speeds as low as 11Mbps.

After completely removing all my HDX devices I now have reasonable speeds between the. However I now need to buy another one.

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