Grok Review - ZyXEL HD Powerline Adapter - Granite Grok

Grok Review – ZyXEL HD Powerline Adapter

zyxel_600_mbps_powerline_1056772When the WiFi didn’t reach the corners of the house with enough oomph to handle a couple of online gamers I went looking for solutions. Several presented themselves. Run cable. Add a router or router booster. I could even suck up the pain and pay for more bandwidth. But the solution I settled on was a powerline adapter.

These devices plug into a standard outlet and use your house wiring to carry your internet signal.

After much searching, I chose the ZyXEL HD Powerline Adapter. At under $40 US/per pair these Gigabit Ethernet Adapters boast 600 Mbps and in-line encryption for each end user device.  There are other models, some faster, some with AC outlets built in so you don’t have to sacrifice “a plug” to add the device. Ours only have one ethernet port each but they have versions with two per adapter.

One adapter takes a cable from your router. The others deliver it to devices where the wifi doesn’t cut it. And so far it’s solved our problem.

My power-user online gaming kids stopped complaining about slow speeds and lag immediately even when on at the same time.

We even added one for the Fire TV, vastly improving the speed of our streaming services and virtually eliminating buffering issues or signal loss.

We currently run two routers and use four powerline adapters. The adapters feed off the router in the basement. The second router is on the main floor for all the other wireless devices. And everyone has stopped complaining about the lousy internet because we never had lousy internet we just didn’t have the right delivery solution.

Even during peak use periods around dinner time, we don’t seem to have any issues.

I highly recommend these if you’ve got a similar situation in your domicile.

**No one compensated me for this review, I just like these things enough to share them with you.

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