TP-LINK AV500 Powerline Kit Review - Get Ethernet Anywhere

We got to review the TL-PA4010PKIT, a starter kit for 500Mbps powerline kit, that enables the user to get high speed ethernet anywhere in the house at an affordable price point!

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Let's say for example that you live in a house that doesn't have drops of ethernet to every square inch of the place, yet you still need an ethernet drop to that exact location. Usually the latter is required for Set-top boxes that your ISP gives you as a part of the IPTV package. Well, that was the use case in our scenario, at least, and that is where powerline adapters come into play.

Today we are looking at the TP-Link AV500 Powerline adapter with AC Passthrough. The whole AV500 is a system of devices that you can use around the whole house if you don't have any drops whatsoever. In this review sample we have just their starter kit that connects two devices from one point to the other.

The whole unboxing experience is quite simple. In the packaging we get two adapters, two ethernet cables and a few pamphlets, a quick start guide, etc. As far as the hardware specs go, each of the adapters features one 100Mbps ethernet port, an integrated power socket, so that we don't loose a power socket when we plug in the Powerline adapter - that's a pretty nifty feature if you ask us - and a simple pair button.

The power consumption of the device is up to 5W and goes down to 0.72W in Standby mode. The rated range of the device is 300 meters, although I seriously can't test that because our house is just not as big, maybe our viewers from the US can provide us some feedback on that specification. But it has to be said that it always worked quite fine without any interruptions, lag or any other noticable problems.

The setup process for the AV500 is really, incredibly simple. We just take one ethernet cable directly from our router, connect it to the ethernet port on one of the Powerline adapters and plug the thing into the wall socket. Now all we have to do is to repeat the process on the other side with the device we wish to connect to the internet. One thing to note here is that we should never connect the Powerline adapter to a splitter or a power bar, we should strive to connect it to the plug directly on the wall socket so there are less chances for the signal to get lost in transmission and lessen the network speed we can actually achieve.

When we have connected the Powerline adapter to the STB with an ethernet cable and plugged the AV500 to the wall, it should automatically connect to the one we have configured before. In the event that it does not, all we have to do is press the Pair button first on the transmitter side (so the one that is closer to our router) and then click the pair button on the one in the living room. It simply works - it fully saturates the 100Mbps interface on its connector. And that is in all honesty enough for any non-heavy use that is not a directly connected NAS or an HTPC media player that plays uncompressed Bluray files from the web. And additionally it did not introduce any additional ping or delay when playing games. Sometimes we saw a 1-2ms jump when compared being plugged in directly to the router, and that is not a different that is in any way noticable when we are playing games, except if it is for esports, and then we need a dedicated cable for that.

To quickly recap - the TP-Link AV500 Starter kit is an affordable Powerline adapter with AC Passthrough that I can't really find any big fault with it. It works, it is unobtrusive, it's simple to plug in, it's simple to configurre - well, it's self-configuring so configuration is really not a problem. And, it doesn't bother us in any way. A highly recommended product if you need ethernet where you don't have any ethernet cables.