I have the power!

If you're like me, you stream entertainment a ton. Whether it's Netflix, Hulu, or some third thing, no one likes it when a show stops to buffer. This is the problem I've been facing when streaming with my PS4. I believe my wifi is fine. My laptop, phone, even my PS3 all work great. I've come to believe that the PS4 just has a shitty antenna. I always try to be hard wired when possible when it comes to my home network but sometimes it's much easier to go wireless. Well, there's another option.

I've been doing a bunch of reading about powerline adapters. Essentially what they are are two adapters that plug into a normal electrical outlet and turn your home's wiring into a really long network cable. What this allows you to do is extend your hard wired network into any room in your house. So how do you set it up? It's easy. You plug one adapter into an outlet near your router. Then take a network cable and plug it into your router and into the adapter. Then you take the other adapter and plug into an outlet near whatever electronic device you want to have network. Then plug a cable from that adapter into said electronic device. Bam. You now have a hard wired connection. No more dropping of signal strength and other issues with wifi. You do get a slight drop of speeds compared to if you just a ran a typical network cable to the electronic device from your router, but length can be an issue. Also you don't want cables just lying about. I have heard of things like the washer and dryer, or microwave potentially creating slight drops in speed as well with powerline adapters. We'll see if I run into issues.

So I did a couple of speedtests on my PS4 and laptop that I typically stream from, both before and after the powerline installation. Before install, the PS4 was getting tests of 16, 4, and even 2 Mbps. Wtf. The laptop was much much better with 60, 62, and 61 Mbps. As a comparison, my main computer that is plugged straight into my router gets 92 Mbps. After install, the PS4 got 34, 32, and 35 Mbps. That's a ton better but still not great. The laptop got the tiniest of nudges up to 68, 66, and 70 Mbps. Not bad.

At $70 for the Netgear PL1200, I'll see if I end up keeping it. Knowing that I get 90+ Mbps on my main computer and my laptop getting the best at 60+, that's a 30% drop off that I'm not sure I can live with. I may have to bite the bullet and finally run a network cable under the house into the living room.