500 Mbps or 200 Mbps are the bit rate over the powerline physical layer, which means the real data to transmit plus the overhead due to embedded protocols (TCP, IP, Ethernet, Powerline).
- If you remove all of these overheads (that guarantee the stream arrives to point B without any errors) you will get the net bitrate available.
- For 200 Mbps (e.g. XAVB1301), the Powerline physical rate in best case (which means almost no attenuation and no noise on the power line) would be around 170 to 200 Mbps, which means a net bit rate around 75 to 85 Mbps (Mbits/sec)
- For 500 Mbps (XAVB5201 or XAVB5101), the Powerline physical rate in best case (which means almost no attenuation and no noise on the power line) would be around 450 to 500 Mbps.
For the XAV5101 (with a Gigabit Ethernet port), the net bit rate available at Ethernet port would be around 200 to 250 Mbps (Mbits/sec).
For the XAV5201 (with a Faster Ethernet port), the net bit rate available at Ethernet port would be around 85 to 95 Mbps (Mbits/sec). This is due to the Fast Ethernet port on the product which is limited to 100 Mbps max.
- Therefore the XAVB5201 will be limited to 95 Mbps (in best conditions) where an XAVB1301 will be blocked at 85 Mbps.
- You would say that at this stage there is no real interest to take a 500 Mbps product. But this is wrong if you consider that in your house you can have more than two adapters, maybe five adapters (for example).
- The 500 Mbps powerline pipe will then be shared between five adapters at the same time, meaning that youre able to exchange much more data than on a 200 Mbps pipeline.
- A useful analogy is if you look at it like a highway with two lanes for 200 Mbps and five lanes for 500 Mbps. With two lanes, you can go at the same speed if only two cars on each lane. But if there are five cars, there may be some traffic build up. This would not be the case on the five lanes highway.
- So, having five XAVB5201 adapters at home is much better than having five XAVB1301.