Converting to Powerline on one machine can be a help to your whole house

Since I've done that, I've been able to diagnose other problems in the house that don't have anything to do with networking. It's not that hard, and if you're not-a-renter, it's a great little project that'll give you knowledge over your house should other things go wrong.

Don't get me wrong -- powerline's great. But cat6 is greater, cheaper, easier, not mutually-exclusive, and, unlike powerline, adds value onto the house.

I can agree with OP about the superiority of Powerline. I've stretched them as much as running it in my old house to a cottage circa 25 meters from the router. In the cottage I've had 6 computers linked to Internet trough 3 switches, which all come down to the single PLC adapter. Latency and overall bandwidth is almost the same, whilst WiFi struggles to even reach some devices, such as phones.

For OP I would suggest trying different wall sockets as well; I've noticed that different wall sockets provide different speeds, whilst some don't even work for me.

The adapters I'am using are low tier D-Link adapters.

Instead I just wired my whole house with Cat6 instead. Nice patch panel in the basement, and I am a happy camper.

For example, the inverters of solar panels are known to kill powerline networking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug

Basically IP over the same wires that you use for electricity.

Seems pretty crazy!

Anyway, the latest generation of Powerline is called G.hn: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.hn As you can see, it's targeting 1Gb/s rates, which is pretty cool!

I'd turned to powerline a few years ago, once it became clear that, between the walls and my neighbors, I couldn't reasonably cover my apartment with only one access point. It more-or-less worked, but was pretty flaky (fluctuating speed, lots of trouble streaming video, resetting the powerline adapters and/or other devices several times a week, etc.). Eventually I started to notice patterns, like speed always dropping when we ran the washer or dryer. I ended up deciding that our apartment wiring just wasn't good enough to do powerline networking reliably (not shocking, we've had issues on other fronts).

Since I wasn't in a position to get the landlord to upgrade our wiring, I went looking for a powerline alternative. Fortunately for me, by then 802.11ac was just ready enough for me to jump onto the bleeding edge. 802.11ac has had its own issues, but I can reliably watch Netflix, Amazon and YouTube in my bedroom and that's what counts.

I've been pleased with the results. It is slower for single, large data streams. However, I primarily use my home network to access a NAS, and it seems to be smoother and faster over powerline- perhaps because there are far fewer lost packets, and it is supposed to be full duplex (?) so it behaves better in a random-access situation. In theory there is also more headroom for other devices, while WiFi generally sucks up all the available spectrum for just one device.