One connects your router to a network via electrical wiring, the other broadcasts Wi-Fi

Mar 3, 2014 08:19 GMT  ·  By

Powerline networking is a pretty ingenious invention that can create a local area network (LAN) inside a home just by using the electrical wiring in the walls. Lately, the technology has begun combining with wireless transmission, and TP-LINK has just launched a product that does that very thing.

Said product is called the TL-WPA4220KIT Wireless Range Extender Kit, and it allows you to enable remote access to your router, of a sort.

Perhaps it's too much to call it remote, since you'll be extending web access to another room or two at most, but the concept is the same.

So how does it work, you may ask? It's actually pretty straightforward really. If you have a router, you just need to connect one of two adapters to it, then plug the other in the power socket elsewhere in your home.

You have to be specific which adapter you use for each role, though, because TP-LINK had to build them differently.

The TL-PA4010 is the one you need to connect to your router. That done, it feeds the network connection through the electrical circuitry of your house at 500 Mbps.

The second adapter, called TL-WPA4220, picks up that signal and broadcasts it at 300 Mbps Wi-Fi speed.

But this wastes 200 Mbps, so the adapter also has a pair of Ethernet ports for your PC or other wired network devices.

When they work as a team, the two components of the TP-Link Wireless Range Extender Kit TL-WPA4220KIT can extend over a range of 1,000 feet / 300 meters of electrical wiring.

So if you own a multi-level home or a large office building, you can employ one or several of these things to link every PC and consumer electronic to the web without any hassle.

Both adapters in the TL-WPA4220KIT have 128-bit AES encryption and both Pair and Wi-Fi Clone Buttons. They can clone the wireless network name and password of the connected router, and they can be relocated for the best coverage.

Finally, the new powerline kit from TP-Link is compliant with HomePlug AV, IEEE802.3, IEEE802.3u, IEEE802.11b/g/n specifications. In layman terms, these specifications are what dictate support for all the features we mentioned above.

The TP-Link TL-WPA4220KIT has a price of $59.99, which is the same as €43.50, according to the exchange rate at the time of this writing. It's pretty likely that the EU price will be of €59.99 instead though.