Hi,

We recently started to setup a home office and thought we'd need a way to extend a network connection to it (a garage not physically connected to the house) so we opted for Powerline, and got this (https://www.amazon.co.uk/TL-WPA4220KIT-Powerline-Broadband-Configuration-UK/dp/B01LXOZ4EN/ref=zg_bs_430576031_sccl_1/259-6369969-8722405) from Amazon which specifically describes itself as "extend up to 300 Mbps Wireless connections", so I assumed that would be the approximate maximum speed via WiFi, as well as "Provides fast powerline transfer speeds of up to 600 Mbps*" from the individual product page of the extender here (https://www.tp-link.com/uk/home-networking/powerline/tl-wpa4220/v5/ / https://www.tp-link.com/uk/home-networking/powerline/tl-wpa4220-kit/ - the extender I have is also V5).

However, when I opened the box I was a bit surprised when the two ethernet cables supplied were cat 5, and indeed using these cables without the powerline system (direct from router to computer) showed a network speed capped at just short of 100 Mbps, which is roughly what I was expecting, so I instead chose to use a cat 5E cable and a cat 6 cable that I had, which both achieved > 800Mbps from a 2.5Gbps port on the router. However, after setting up the adapter and extender, doing everything except unifying the WiFi network either via WPS or manually (I wanted to test in isolation first so I knew I wasn't just testing my own network), I was disappointed that no matter what combination I tried (including using the supplied ethernet cables), I wasn't able to surpass ~95Mbps either via ethernet or WiFi. So after a bit of research, I found the hardware specs (https://www.tp-link.com/uk/home-networking/powerline/tl-wpa4220-kit/) which told me that neither component actually had an ethernet port capable of handling >100Mbps speeds (which also fit with the speeds being reported to me by my routers web interface). As a last attempt, I unified the WiFi networks (just in case for some reason it drew on WiFi as well to reach the speeds it said above) and then took the extender out to the garage to test it (previously everything had been done at a mains plug socket around 3m from the router / adapter - all on the same circuit) however I found that I was still at ~50Mbps over WiFi using the extender, however just from turning off the extender and relying only on the router's WiFi signal, the speed increased ~5x.

So overall I'm not quite sure why it claims the speeds it does (unless I'm missing something important here - please let me know if I am) when it seems fairly strictly limited at 100Mbps? I could understand there being some speed loss from using Powerline and it was never going to be 100% efficient, but this seems a bit strange?

Side note: on the Amazon page, it lists the Maximum Powerline Speed and WiFi Speed Up To as AV600 and N300Mbps respectively, I assumed that these just meant 600Mbps and 300Mbps and trying to search just brought me back to these products but based on my experience with the product now I wonder if they mean something different, if someone knows and could let me know it would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Jack