Product Reviews

Power plug adapters are devices that use the mains electricity lines in your home as network cables. To add a PC to your network, you just connect an adapter to its Ethernet port, then plug the adapter into a mains socket. You need another adapter cabled to another PC (or router), and plugged in elsewhere in your home, to complete the link, so they're sold in pairs. It's a simple way to set up a network, and doesn't suffer the range and reception issues of WiFi.

Our last group test of power plug adapters was won by the Devolo dLAN 200 AV Desk. With a sustained data transfer rate of 15Mbit/sec, it was more than twice as fast

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as its closest rival. This month we got our hands on the new Solwise HomePlug AV Simple Connect and it achieved 50Mbit/sec - more than three times as fast.

This seemed too good to be true, so we checked, and got the same results. We even dusted off the Devolo products and re-tested them in exactly the same way as the Simple Connect. Still 15Mbit/sec.

The Solwise adapters have another benefit: when you plug them in, they automatically connect to any compatible adapters on your mains. You press the Simple Connect button on one adapter, then make your way briskly to the second (you've got two minutes) and press the button on that. The adapters will find each other, and your two PCs are now connected. We tried it, and it works.

Your connection is secured with 128-bit AES encryption - more than enough to prevent anyone trying to sneak in. The software that comes with the adapters doesn't do much except allow you to update firmware and specify some quality of service (QoS) settings, but getting the adapters working is so easy that you don't need any more.

These are the fastest power plug adapters we've seen, and cost the same as their nearest competitor, which is three times slower. Sold.