The “Break it Down” Blog

PCWorld reports that Panasonic has announced they will be debuting some new Powerline devices at CES this year (in less than 2 days!).

We can only hope that these new powerline adapters are the HomePlug Powerline AV II spec-compliant devices that we’ve been waiting for… for like 2 years. The hope being that the Powerline AV II devices will push us closer to Gigabit ethernet without the need of pre-wiring your house or running flaky/incompatible Wireless-N solutions around with WAPs to get a decent signal.

The first Panasonic powerline adapters trickled out in 2004 with Linksys and NETGEAR being the other notable players in the powerline market. Unfortunately beyond the initial 11mbps speeds, the powerline adapters in general hit the “advertised” 70mbps and then 200mbps speeds about a year or two ago with no advancement since then. I put “advertised” in quotes because actual performance always tends to be around 60-80mbps in lab tests.

While NETGEAR’s recent announcement of refreshed 200mbps Powerline adapters was nice for the Powerline industry at large, it didn’t make a whole lot of sense given that NETGEAR already had 200mbps powerline devices (pulling in less than stellar reviews).