 Today I have an unboxing of an item that looks not very interesting. A single power line adapter from Netgear. Why is this cool? Well, because it is compliant with the draft standard 1905.1 Hi-Fi or hybrid fidelity standard from Qualcomm. So what's interesting about that is that it is going to turn power line into something from something that's kind of niche, requires multiple adapters and isn't really integrated with the rest of your network in a meaningful way. It's going to turn that as well as wireless access points that operate on power line and wireless range extenders into something that automatically provides fail safes, automatically picks the optimal path for your network to travel in order to give you the best possible networking throughout your entire home. So that sounds like very vague and very nebulous. So what I'll do is I'll give you guys an example. Over here, no I'm going to read it over, don't worry. Here I have a 1905 compliant router. So this router has your standard wired, wireless interfaces and it has a plug that goes into the wall and turns your entire house into a power line ready network. Right here I have a completely the wrong brand power line adapter. This is Netgear. The router that I have is D-Link. But it has the Hi-Fi software loaded on it, which means that it can communicate with this. In fact, all Hi-Fi compliant devices will with one button configuration figure out how to communicate with each other in order to pick the best possible path. So here, here's my hypothetical network. So I've plugged this into the wall. I've got some computer plugged in here. I've got a wireless phone here. My phone is operating off of wireless. And then I take this power line adapter and I go plug it in somewhere else entirely. So if I have all of my network devices enabled on say something like a notebook, it will go Wi-Fi automatically. Now with this software patch, assuming all of my adapters and all of my equipment is compatible, what it'll do is if I plug into here, it'll automatically go over power line. If I plug into a wire, it'll automatically go over wire. So what it'll do is it'll intelligently figure out the best possible path. So if I have a TV, let's say my TV has built-in Wi-Fi, okay? And then I have something else plugged in by Ethernet. So it'll automatically go, okay, the quickest possible way, the best possible way with the best signal is to go through Ethernet and then go wirelessly to the TV. Or it might decide that's not the best. What if my house is really big? And I have either a power line or some other kind of access point that or a range extender set up on my network. Your range extender, as long as it's Hi-Fi ready, your, okay, get this, your router will know to take the wired signal and pass it not directly to the TV but to the enabled range extender which will then pass it to the TV if that is the strongest signal that it can achieve. So that's what's cool about this. It will allow us to take power line which I'm a huge advocate of. If you guys watch any of my videos, you probably already know that and turn it into something that works seamlessly between manufacturers. Right now the only way to set up power line is you go Ethernet cable from the back of your router into a power line adapter, power line adapter into the wall and then you have another power line adapter somewhere else that goes out with an Ethernet cable to something else. Well now we're taking out one of them so we're reducing the overall cost of implementation for power line and we're making it more interoperable. So you don't have to worry about, oh if I buy this power line adapter now and I want to expand my network later and I can't get it anymore, it's not going to be compatible, you don't have to think about that anymore. As long as it's 1905 compliant then you'll be able to use completely mismatched hardware like this and build your network in a way that is seamlessly upgradeable and intelligently decides what is the fastest way to move your data around. That seems like a very good thing to me. And since this is technically an unboxing of the power line AV500 adapter, I should probably talk about this guy a little bit, it's got a gigabit connection on it and that's not necessarily something you might consider relevant but it is because even though it's only a 500 megabit per second power line adapter, many 500 megabit per second power line adapters and 200 megabit per second power line adapters include only 10 hundred ports which means that unless you're using multiple adapters in which case it behaves more like a hub, you are actually going to be limited by this port rather than by the power line interface itself. So what is a 500 megabit per second power line adapter? Well, if you wanted to stream multimedia, multiple HD streams and have a gigabit connection you would need that. Otherwise a 200 megabit per second connection is probably fine, you can actually stream HD over 200 megabit just fine as long as you aren't running multiple power line adapters because like I said, multiple power line adapters will act as a hub. So that means that instead of sending the data only where it goes, power line will actually transmit the data to every node on the network and so you can end up with a lot of overhead if you have a whole bunch of power line devices. So I'd say anywhere from 2 to probably around 5 is about all you really want to do although most households won't need much more than that. So thank you for checking out my unboxing of the PowerLine AV500 adapter. Don't forget to subscribe for all of my tech tips from unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.