At first I thought this would prevent or greatly hinder my use of powerline networking but my powerline networking works just fine over multiple power phases (apparently a shared consumer unit is key).

The bigger variable in my case was the fact I have a three phase power supply, rather than the more usual one.

Plugging them in and getting them working took all of five minutes and voila – connectivity! The speeds weren’t great (around 80M bps on average, so 5-6M Bps on file transfers) but then my house was built in the 70s so it’s not especially modern and that does affect speeds. My local computer store had a couple of TP-Link units in stock ( WPA4220 Starter Kit) and I bought them on a whim. I’d used an early set of these (85Mbps) back in 2007 but standards have definitely advanced in this area and now we have 500Mbps adapters ( well sort of) so I thought it was worth revisiting the technology.

I’ve recently moved house and didn’t want to go to the time and expense of wiring up my new house with CAT6 ethernet, so opted for some Powerline adapters instead. Summary: Powerline adaptors are better than they used to be but they aren’t without their problems.

Tp link powerline utility not detecting