TP-Link Powerline WiFi Extender TL-WPA7617 - AC1200 Dual Band Powerline Network Extender, Gigabit Port, Passthrough, OneMesh, Ethernet Over Power, 𝐀𝐝𝐝-𝐨𝐧 𝐔𝐧𝐢𝐭

works great

Works great! I have wifi in the shop, and couldn’t make a call before.

I have a device in my garage that’s too far from the nearest wireless access point in my house. I purchased this so that I could provide WiFi to my garage to connect smart devices there. It was super easy to setup, and has been reliable over the past half a year. However, maybe it’s because of my electrical power wiring, but the most bandwidth I’ve seen running multiple speed tests is about 20 mbps down and about 2 mbps up. My ISP provides 1 gbps down and up. And I get that speed when hardwired directly to the router. So it’s a pretty steep bandwidth drop but is enough to operate a smart lock and some MyQ garage door cameras.

Our cable internet provider says our signal should be at least 500 Mbps down, and currently a wired connection measures in the low 600’s. Wi-Fi on the other side of the house drops to about 330 Mbps. Powerline Wi-Fi extenders have been recommended by folks who should know on online forums to which we belong, so we hoped this extender would provide a good signal throughout the house, including some places where we don’t have one.However, with the adapter plugged into a port on the router, the extender barely produced 30 Mbps when plugged into an outlet on the same electrical circuit. This is good enough to stream 4K video, but no useable signal was present when we plugged into an outlet where we needed it, so we returned the device for a refund. My husband fiddled with it for a week or so, but it just didn’t work in our house.Perhaps the poor performance is due to the way our house is wired. It was built in 1989 when houses were wired room by room, with outlets and lighting fixtures on the same circuit. Or maybe there is some other reason.As a sidebar I can report that powerline Wi-Fi is compatible with X-10 home automation, as all our X-10 devices continued to work. X-10 is an older home automation protocol which wouldn’t be installed today, but since our system works just fine there is no need to replace it. Or maybe the reason there was no interference between the two systems is because the Wi-Fi signal was so weak. Strange that our house wiring supports an old automation protocol but not a new Wi-Fi system.

This past year we moved to a more remote part of town and even with fiber optic WiFi, we were having a problem with buffering and needing to reboot the system. My son purchased this and it has helped the problem. The signal strength is so much stronger throughout the house. We do a lot of streaming and the speed is noticeably better. It was well worth every penny

I am keeping the device, now that it's working, but was not without tech support "pain" and a return of one unit. The first unit essentially would not function after attempting WPS emulation. Even after factory reset, it would not show up in WiFi. I returned and tried again with another unit. The WPS would still not work, and my router does have WPS. The process worked, exactly as the "Unify your Wi-Fi Network via WPS" instruction, and I got all green lights. Except, it didn't work. OK, I downloaded the iPhone app, and tried to configure manually, but that option does not exist on the phone app. I downloaded the tpPLC Utility for Mac. The utility is not confirmed by Apple, so you get a warning that it won't run due to possible malware. I stopped there. I then went down the path of tech support with TP-link directly, and did get a helpful tech-support guy. He pointed me back to (only) the computer utility for manual configuration. He said go ahead and authorize the tpPLC Utility in Settings and allow it to run. (Settings, security and privacy, Allow Apps downloaded... and select Run for the tpPLC utility). While not complicated, this is required or the utility won't run. Once the utility is running, it DID find the satellite Wi-FI unit, and it did allow me to just change the SSID and password to be identical to the parent router, and the unit now functions. If you've read this far, you probably can do the same thing, and so I'm writing this review for "you". But my experience is most people will just "quit" before they get to this point, thus I can only give a 3 star review. It seems it will work for me now, but the process was painful and required hours of my time to figure out.

only a week in service but working excellently. EASY set-up.same performance on either powerline leg.

Great product. Reasonable price. Good Description.