Comtrend G.hn 1200 Mbps Wireless Powerline Ethernet Bridget with WiFi (PG-9171N)

The Short Story: Great Product! I bought this unit - along with two others from Comtrend that are G.hn but have no WiFi - to extend my home office network into the studio behind our house. Setting up the first two units - both PG-9172's, one as a base and one in my office - was easy and took about 10 minutes. Setting this one up was easy, but more trouble, because I couldn't get it to connect with the base until, located at my router. Tech support responded to my question THE SAME DAY, and told me to reset this unit (WiFi) to factory spec (a matter of holding the Config button for 10-20 seconds), and then to NOT use "security" since I was in a single family home (not an apartment or condo). Did all that; works great. The signal is good enough that my desktop signed onto the Comtrend WiFi (another building and 80 feet away) rather than my base router which is in the room below my office. You can't go wrong with these products or this company.

Works as intended, but gets extremely hot. This is a potential hazard.

The WiFi portion is lacking. I measure 1/3 of the download capability that I get on the Ethernet, IEEE 802.3, connection on this same device, in the same room. That said, I found that I needed the Ethernet direct-connection to the Toshiba Fire TV to be uninterrupted by other home 2.4GHz devices, and it does just that.The SSID of the WiFi on this unit is unique, and apparently not able to be cloned. Each 9171n will have a unique ID as well. I find this advantageous, some other reviewers don't.Other than the overly complicated setup of the TV (not the fault of this unit) and the slow WiFi download speeds of this Comtrend 9171n, I find it quite satisfactory in my "wireless-impaired" home.

I purchased 2 of these so that I could connect one to my router downstairs by Ethernet cable, and then plug one in where I have a dead zone upstairs to use as a secondary router. Problem is the second Contrend did not recognize the first Contrend so it completely defeated the purpose. To my understanding it’s supposed to be a system that treats the electric wiring almost as if it’s one long Ethernet cable going from the router downstairs, through the Ethernet cable into Comtrend1, through the walls and up to Comtrend2 upstairs, but that functionality never worked. Then as a secondary measure, I tried to connect the Comtrend2 to the Comtrend1 with WPS and that also didn’t work. One time I was able to connect the Comtrend2 with the stock router through WPS, but it appeared to just be blind luck because I can’t get that to work again once it disconnected, and even so, the signal was weak. So essentially the product has been completely useless to me.

At my office I use VOIP and my office phone plugs into an ethernet jack. For the pandemic, I brought my office phone home and plugged it into our wifi router's ethernet jack. Our router is located in our living room so I either had to answer calls there or have a 100 foot cable snaking through the house to the home office. Neither option was great so I explored wifi bridges such as these. To my surprise they worked beautifully and are simple to set up. Just plug one into an electrical outlet in one room and use the included ethernet cable to plug into your phone. Plug another one (you need two) into an electrical outlet near your wifi router and run the ethernet cable from that one to the router. That's it.