Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #484 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Max Value
• Model: MV37210
• Released on: 2007-07-17

Manufacturer's Description
Let Max Value save you time and money by utilizing AC power lines in a home or office for networking, the adaptors are compliant with Homeplug specification 1.0 and have a High Speed Transfer rate of up to 85 Mbps.

Installation is simple with the HomePlug's built-in plug-and-play technology, plug each adapter in an AC wall socket and connect a patch cable to each bridge. A minimum of 2 adaptors are needed and more can be added as the network grows, making this an ideal starter kit.

Box Contents

Customer Reviews

So simple.
I bought this recently and its really made my network easier - simply plugged the homeplugs into the mains and it worked.

Although it doesnt mention it in the product description this pack comes with 2 ethernet cables, so you dont even need to buy those. There was some software with it as well but it worked without so I didnt use it.

I was a little apprehensive about buying this set as I hadnt heard of the brand and they look fairly generic; but they have worked perfectly so far. Overall an excellent way of extending a network if you dont want to/cant use wireless.

Simple and very effective
I have tried several flavours of wireless (currently on "g" MIMO) and always have problems with data transfer rates and occasional drop outs. Regardless of what manufacturers tell you, in a house in an urban environment where there is a lot of other electro-magnetic interference wireless simply does not perform well. I was very frustrated by this and didn't want the expense of running Cat 5 cable throughout the house. Then I spotted these plugs. I must admit that I was initially sceptical but at under £50 a pair I decided to try them. Never has an installation been so simple. I ran a cable (it comes with 2 cables) from my router into the plug and then ran another cable from the other plug to my computer. The router is upstairs and the computer is downstairs and it worked first time...simple!!! The application that comes with it tells you what speed you're actually getting. Mine runs at 65Mbps on average but that is with both plugs plugged into plug boards which is something the manufacturers don't recommend for reasons of interference. It feels a lot faster than my 54Mbps MIMO wireless connection and is totally stable and lightening fast to connect on start up. These do exactly what they should with the minimum of fuss. You won't be disappointed.

can you make do with these slower 85mbps units?
Be very sceptical of that 85mbps speed quoted in specs. If you read the supplied manual it says 25mbps (typical) . This is the maximum I have attained with pair of these homeplugs in adjacent sockets. That is to say: you get a maximum of 3.5 MegaBytes per second ( with one directional transfer ) . BTW It can make a fair difference to transfer rates whether you push or pull those files too.

So, that does not sound too bad, does it...? Well, this dropped to 300kBytes/s when I was moving files between computers in an empty ( 'silent' small 4-bedroom house ) different floors or even rooms separated by a single wall. Here wireless 802.11g worked better.

However, careful swapping of sockets increased my upstairs/downstairs speed to 2MBytes/s. Please bear this in mind if you are tearing your hair out attempting large file transfers. 5 ( optimum ) to 8 mins for a single Gigabyte file. Strangely, plugging kettles, microwaves, toasters & washing machines only slightly reduced the transfer rate.

Incidentally, playback of movie Dvd over a mapped drive was fine in Windows XP after my socket-swapping exercise but hopelessly unpleasant before .

I would be keen to compare the pricier 200mbps units in the same environment. Would they be better where the 85mbps plugs were so poor or only faster in ideal conditions. Has anyone done adjacent socket testing of the MaxValue 200 units? Think I read web reviews about 80ish mbits/s ( so 10MBytes a second ) but unsure if this is sustained or the best transient value obtained. If you have these perhaps you could tell me how long it takes you to transfer a single 1GB file under various conditions.