Power Line Adaptors - mixing the AV's?

Lulu58

I purchased a couple of the TP-LINK TL-PA7020PKIT AV1000 2 Port Gigabit Pass Through Powerline Adapters a while back as my husband was having problems with wi-fi. My pc is connected to the router via an ethernet cable and so is his now via the adaptor and it works well.

We now want to stream HD TV programmes and I picked up another couple of the adaptors, or so I thought. I've actually bought the TP-LINK TL-PA9020P KIT AV2000 2-Port Gigabit Passthrough Powerline Adapters by mistake.

Can I use the new adaptors with the existing one's, especially when one is AV1000 and the other is AV2000?

Le_Kirk

The 1000 or 2000 is the Mbps rate, so 1,000 or 2,000. All are backwards compatible but of course will only run at the rate/speed of the slowest one.

Lulu58

Thanks, Le-Kirk. I have a pair of both the AV1000 and AV2000 adaptors, would it make sense to swap the AV1000 currently connected to the router to one of the new AV2000 or is that a red herring?

stator

All Homeplug AV adapters should work together, you just have to make sure they are all configured to use the same Network ID using the drivers provided. Don't try to use the buttons to auto-config, they don't work well in my experience.
Once you have them working yes it makes sense to use the AV2000 on the devices that will need the most bandwidth to pass between them.
Bear in mind that the 2000 refers to the bandwidth of the whole network, so the more devices are streaming at the same time, the less bandwidth will be available.

Do you have a gigabit switch on your router and gigabit network adapters on your computers? If not, streaming very high quality video might be a problem.

Lulu58

Thanks for the info, stator. I never thought of the issue re number of devices etc, but what you are saying makes sense.

I don't have a gigabit switch on my router that I can see, and I don't believe we have gagabit network adaptors on our computers. Is this an issue if we are viewing through a Panasonic recorder which gives us access to iPlayer, Netflix etc?

stator

Neither iPlayer or Netflix will use much bandwidth as it's over the internet and will be compressed to suit your internet, which I'm guessing isn't over 100mbit.
It's just if you are streaming uncompressed video from one PC/device to another that you might need gigabit.
It doesn't sound like you'll have problems.

Lulu58

Thanks, stator.