I have two netgear powerline AV 500 ethernet adapters that give me near ideal internet access on my media computer (FIOS 25/25mpbs tests out at 8ms 25.4/24.7) and perhaps 100-140mbps to my router, printer, drive, etc. I now want to add a few wifi points and instead of having the mess of a powerline adapter + a wifi router I think it will be neater to have an all in one solution. Most of the ones that I find are 200mbps, however. I know that 500 is backwards compatible, but will a mixed solution slow everything down like it can for a mixed wireless g/n network?
Answer
200 and 500 Mbps adapters can be mixed. If you have for example
- Adapter 1: 500 Mbps
- Adapter 2: 500 Mbps
- Adapter 3: 200 Mbps
- Adapter 4: 200 Mbps
then adapters 1 and 2 will have an up-to-500 Mbps connection. All other connections (with at least one 200 Mbps adapter involved) will be up to 200 Mbps.
The only impact of 200 Mbps adapters on a 500 Mbps network is that 200 Mbps adapters are blocking the shared medium power circuit longer than 500 Mbps adapters would do, thus traffic on 200 Mbps adapters takes longer than if 500 Mbps adapters where used. This reduces the overall network performance a little bit. I don't know if this effect is really noticeable in a standard real life scenario.
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