today i have an unboxing of an item that looks not very interesting a single
power line adapter from netgear why is this cool
well because it is compliant with the
draft standard 1905.1 hi-fi or hybrid fidelity standard
from qualcomm so what's interesting about that is that it is going to turn
power line into something from something that's kind of niche uh requires
multiple adapters and isn't really integrated with the rest of your network
in a meaningful way it's going to turn that as well as wireless access points
that operate on powerline and wireless range extenders into something that
automatically provides fail safes automatically
picks the optimal path for your network to travel in order to give you the best
possible networking throughout your entire home so that sounds like very
vague and very nebulous so what i'll do is i'll give you guys an example over
here no i'm gonna bring it over don't worry here i have a 1905 compliant
router so this router has your standard wired wireless interfaces and it has a
plug that goes into the wall and turns your
entire house into a power line ready network right here i have a completely
the wrong brand power line adapter this is netgear
the router that i have is d-link
but it has the hi-fi software loaded on
it which means that it can communicate with this in fact all hi-fi compliant
devices will with one button
configuration figure out how to communicate with each other in order to
pick the best possible path so here here's my hypothetical network so i've
plugged this into the wall i've got some computer plugged in here i've got a
wireless uh phone here my phone is operating off of wireless and then i
take this powerline adapter and i go plug it in somewhere else entirely okay
so if i have all of my network devices enabled on say something like a notebook
i it will go wi-fi automatically
now with this software patch assuming all of my adapters and all of my equipment is
compatible what it'll do is if i plug into here
it'll automatically go over power line if i plug into a wire it'll
automatically go over wired so what it'll do is it'll intelligently figure
out the best possible path so if i have a tv let's say my tv has built-in wi-fi
okay and then i have something else plugged in
by Ethernet so it'll automatically go okay the
quickest possible way the best possible way with the best signal is to go
through Ethernet and then go wirelessly to the tv or it
might decide that's not the best what if my house is really big and i have either
a power line or some other kind of access point that or a range extender
set up on my network your range extender as long as it's hi-fi ready
your okay get this your router will know
to take the wired signal and pass it not directly to the tv but
to the enabled range extender which will then pass it to the tv if that is the
strongest signal that it can achieve so that's what's cool about this it will
allow us to take power line which i'm a huge advocate of if you guys watch any
of my videos you probably already know that and turn it into something that
works seamlessly between manufacturers right now the only way to set up
powerline is you go Ethernet cable from the back of your router into a power
line adapter power line adapter into the wall and
then you have another power line adapter somewhere else that goes out with an Ethernet cable to something else well
now we're taking out one of them so we're reducing the overall cost of
implementation for powerline and we're making it more interoperable so you
don't have to worry about oh if i buy this powerline adapter now and i want to expand my network later and i can't get
it anymore it's not going to be compatible you don't have to think about that anymore as long as it's 1905
compliant then you'll be able to use completely
mismatched hardware like this and build your network in a way that is
seamlessly upgradable and intelligently decides what is the fastest way to move
your data around that seems like a very good thing to me and since this is
technically an unboxing of the powerline av500 adapter i should probably talk
about this guy a little bit it's got a gigabit connection on it and
that's not necessarily something you might consider relevant but it is
because even though it's only a 500 megabit per second power line adapter
many 500 megabit per second power line adapters and 200 megabit per second
power line adapters include only 100 ports which means that unless you're
using multiple adapters in which case it behaves more like a hub you are actually
going to be limited by this port rather than by the power line interface itself
so why would you need a 500 megabit per second power line adapter well if you
wanted to stream multimedia multiple hd streams and have a gigabit connection
you would need that otherwise a 200 megabit per second connection is
probably fine you can actually stream hd over 200 megabit just fine as long as
you aren't running multiple powerline adapters because like i said multiple
powerline adapters will act as a hub so
that means that instead of sending the data only where it goes
powerline will actually transmit the data to every node on the network and so
you can end up with a lot of overhead if you have a whole bunch of powerline
devices so i'd say anywhere from you know two to probably around five is
about all you really want to do although most households won't need much more
than that so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the powerline av 500
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