The power cat is a device that can replace the network cable with the wires in the home, realize the data transmission with the cable instead of the network cable, and solve the problem of not having all the network cables in the home. Of course, if you have a network cable, you don’t need it. The TL-PA500 is nominally a 500M power adapter. Since the network cable in the home does not cover all locations, I bought 3 of them. I have 3 AirPort base stations, one of which (AirPort Express) is placed in the weak current box, directly connected to the network cable, and made a dial-up connection, and connected to the power cat with a network cable. Then plug in the power cat at the other two locations and connect to the other two AirPort base stations. Wi-Fi access to three AirPort base stations for a full Wi-Fi signal throughout the home.

In fact, in the manual of TL-PA500, it is stated that its network cable port is a 10/100Mbps port, which means that it cannot reach a speed of more than 100M at all… In fact, I do not believe this. The Power Cat can really hit 500M, so I tested it by copying a 3 GB file to the AirPort Time Capsule with another AirPort base station (wireless) connected. And copy it when directly connected to the AirPort Time Capsule (wireless), compare the time, the distance between the two base stations is about 15m. In particular, the other base station (AirPort Extreme) does not support 802.11ac, while the AirPort Time Capsule does. Both support the 5GHz band, and both use it when copying. After going through the power cat, it took 8 minutes to transfer this 3GB file, which was about 50M, not reaching the limit of 802.11n at 5GHz. Direct transfer, consumes 2 minutes 20 seconds, which is about 170M. Therefore, after passing through the power cat, the transmission speed is limited to about 50M (but it may be the same speed when using the network cable), this speed is still acceptable, because the general network speed in China has not reached this limit. Deploying the Internet is still entirely feasible. However, in the end, the dark line was taken again, and the family LAN finally reached 1000M, which was enough.