I am sick to death of the connection constantly dropping all the time. This is really driving me insane

I purchased the TP-Link TL-WPA281 300Mbps AV200 Wireless N Powerline Extender in Aug 2012. The unit worked great until 2 months ago. Then the connection would start to drop even though all lights were blinking. Connections in other rooms worked fine. Second extender in another bedroom worked fine. I turned off power to extender and then back on to reset. However this is not a permanent fix. Drops are occurring more frequently and is very annoying. I will call TP Link for replacement.

It's very frustrating that this problem persists and TP-Link evidently doesn't think a firmware update is needed, or even that we deserve a reply on this forum. Despite the low price of the products, I will be avoiding TP-Link as a brand in future and advising friends that their Powerline adaptors are too unreliable to be worth buying.

I know i am a bit late with this post but it may help some one as I have had the same problems with the TL-PA411. I did the following when using the user guide, read pages 21 and 22. http://www.tp-link.com.au/Resources/document/TL-PA411_V1_UserGuide_19100106.pdf



1. Plug both units in side by side on a power board then press the join button down one at a time for 10 seconds to wipe to a factory reset for both units, one at a time

2. Mark the units A and B then press the join button down for one second on A then wait 5 seconds and then B. The important bit is that the powerline LED goes solid as this dosent always happed so keep on trying a factory reset and pairing untill the powerline LED turns solid.

3. Check on your powerline software and see is the units are there.

4. Place A at the router end and B at the computer (recieving) end.

I had nothing but trouble with these units out of the box, but after a bit of a play around this worked for me.

paul

Ditto mine. Spent ages trying to find the cause of this, to no avail. Is there no fix?

On another note (and seeing as how TP Link never read this forum), can anyone suggest an alternative brand of AV hubs that works better?

I'm also feed up with my TP Link Powerline devices. They drop out at least once a day and it's nearly always when I have something important to do. I have 4 of them in my network correctly.

Other than the solution posted by "Paul K", which I have tried but still get he drop outs, has anybody found a solution?:confused:

I have this too. drives me up the flippin wall.

it can happen once a day, once an hour, twice in 10 minutes. completely randomly. but when it does all activity stops, and doesn't come back for a long time unless you switch one of the plugs off and on again. more annoyingly the powerline utility reports that every thing is fine.

feels a lot like a firmware issue. but no fix.

PA4030KIT here, also having the problem where the connection drops regularly, be it once an hour or more often. It's a real shame because I was very happy with the performance otherwise.

I'll return it and look for an alternative brand.

The symptoms that I am seeing, mainly on one computer (Windows 8.1 Update 1) is that I am say browsing the web and the browser doesn't display a page. Sometimes I see the yellow triangle on the Ethernet icon in the system tray but other times I don't. I have validated that the issue is not with the Ethernet adapter in the machine by connecting the machine directly to the hub for a week and there were no issues. I also have devices connected via wireless and none of them ever drop.

I have done some further investigation into this and it doesn't seem to matter which speed of TP-Link Powerline adapter you are using the issue is there. I have used bother the AV200 and AV500 versions from TP-Link and there all have this issue - random drop-outs. Some days mine work perfectly but other days they drop out every hour or so. I have 5 in my network all within the maximum distance that TP-Link recommend. I have tried to correlate the drop out with other electrical devices switching on or using a lot of power and there is no correlation. I have also tried to correlate devices emitting any kind of frequency - microwave , television etc. and yet again there is no correlation. I have also put on the wiring in the house a device to monitor for "electrical spikes" and nothing is seen at the time of the drop-out. Only two of my Powerline adapters were purchased at the same time (they have very close serial numbers), the rest were purchased from difference companies at different times and have quite random serial numbers so I am thinking that it can't be a batch of chips that have an issue.

Currently my thoughts are that there is a firmware issue with TP-Link Powerline adapters (both AV200 and AV500) that makes them not "fit for purpose".

I would hope that TP-Link would do something to improve the firmware on their Powerline adapters but I am not confident that they will.

Next move it to contact TP-Link and raise the issue of "fitness for purpose" and see what they say.

Regards

I am also on Windows 8.1. I also have a Ubuntu partition on this PC though, so I might run it on that to see if the same dropout occurs there.