Well a week on..is it a week? Probably more. Anyway, things are faster all round now. I bit the bullet and bought five new 200AV HomePlugs - one of them a wireless extender - to replace my 85Mbs ones. They're marketed as 200Mbs, but that's not really the whole story. There is a Transmit and a Recieve rate, and they can be different. Also, it can depend on your wiring and where the plugs are in relation to each-other. The further away a pair of plugs are, the lower the data rate between them.
Luckily there is a utility you can run on each PC, and it will show the data rates on all plugs relative to the one you are connected to by ethernet. Looking at mine at the moment, I'm getting Transmit/Receive rates of 129/95, 72/117, and 102/60. All in Megabits per second.
Unfortunately there's no immediate way to identify which plug is which as it lists them by MAC address. The old 85Mbps system allowed you to change the name of each plug, so you could label them as "Router", "Xbox" etc. Obviously the data rate to the one with the router is the one that determines internet download speed. All of these seem higher than the 36Mbps my fibre now provides, but that's obviously not he whole story, as speed tests only show a maximum of about 21Mbs through the HomePlugs.
Incidentally this helps to identify the plug connected to the router, as while a speed test is running, you can see the data rate fluctuating on one of the devices.
Although that's only 21Mbs, it's still 10x what I was used to on ADSL, so I shouldn't complain. I'm just intrigued is all.
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