Tenda AV2 1000 P1002P Powerline Adapter Starter Kit Review

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For many, powerline technology carries the weight of their home network far beyond what a wireless extender can do. This technology, as most of you know, uses the existing electrical wiring in your home to extend your network where it's needed.

The latest Homeplug solution from Tenda comes in the form of an AV2 1000 or Gigabit powerline solution. Setting this solution apart from others is its AC pass-through feature which means you no longer have to lose a wall outlet just because you extend your network. Also, this solution houses two LAN ports on each of the wall adapters, both with a 300-meter range. All of this leveraged on the latest technology from Broadcom.

MSRP of the P1002P starter kit from Tenda is listed at $99.99 with a one-year warranty.

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Packaging shows both adapters included in the kit while marketing information cover most of the right side.

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The scope of delivery includes everything needed to get up and running. As you can in the image, we have both adapters with their Ethernet cables and a quick guide.

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Here, we have the front and back of the adapters with both the wall side and pass-through using all available connections.

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The bottom of the adapters is where Tenda has placed the LAN ports side by side.

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The left side near the bottom is where you will find the sync button.

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Over the past few years, I have tested a few powerline solutions including the latest from Netgear and TP-Link. In looking at the chart above, you can see the purple line, being the Tenda, seems to follow the performance characteristics of the AV2 500 from TRENDnet while the two previously tested AV2 1000+ adapters in red and orange on the chart reach closer to 400 Mbps in my testing.

With that said, the Tenda is a well-built solution, and I would certainly have no issues using it within my network. In fact, when setting up my GIGABYTE Brix Pro in my third room, I used the Tenda kit as a stopgap while I made time to run a length of Ethernet cable and there was no noticeable difference. Adding to this, the AC pass-through works without issue, though I do find that if you use these adapters in the bottom outlet, you will block the top.

Performance, as seen in my chart and testing, wasn't the greatest. This adapter seemed to stick around AV500 speeds, and I'm not sure if that's the way it was designed to split bandwidth between the two LAN ports or not. At any rate, peak performance was around 230 Mbps with this solution.

Overall, the Tenda kit, while not hitting the highest levels of performance, feels like it would be perfectly fine for the everyday user. If you are doing heavy downloading or gaming, you may notice the performance, but otherwise, it's a reasonably solid piece of kit for the price.

Tyler's Test System Specifications

• Motherboard: ASUS Z97-A - Buy from Amazon / Read our review
• CPU: Intel Core i7 4770K - Buy from Amazon / Read our review
• Cooler: Corsair H100i GTX - Buy from Amazon / Read our review
• Memory: Patriot Viper 3 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3 1600 - Buy from Amazon
• Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 - Buy from Amazon / Read our review
• Storage: Intel 730 480GB - Buy from Amazon / Read our review
• Case: Corsair Obsidian 750D - Buy from Amazon / Read our review
• Power Supply: Thermaltake Toughpower 750W - Buy from Amazon / Read our review
• OS: Microsoft Windows 10 - Buy from Amazon