HomePlug 1.0 Turbo: An Under-Performer

Four months ago, I test-drove some Aztech powerline network adapters based on Intellon's HomePlug v1.0 Turbo chipset. Although, as I pointed out then, the adapters came nowhere near their '85 Mbps' claim, I was able to squeeze roughly 30 Mbps of bandwidth out of them (which later testing throttled back to 15-20 Mbps, although the slowdown may have been specific to the NAS I was using at the time). The fine folks at Tom's Networking have just completed their own testing of v1.0 Turbo hardware (thanks to Engadget for the heads-up), and their results unfortunately concur with mine. The report summary touts 'an improvement over HomePlug 1.0, but buyers could feel duped due to unusually large difference between the advertised "85Mbps" and real performance', and the cons include such zingers as '10 Mbps is what you're most likely to get' and '2X price premium vs. HomePlug 1.0'. An interesting read; check it out.