I would like here what the Tek Syndicate guys and girl and the Tek Syndicate forum users rather use Homeplugs/Powerline adapters or Wifi?
For me personally I rather have homeplugs. I have a decent router and I did have a expensive pci wifi adapter in my PC. But my connection was still pretty bad taking a good 3 hours to download a 6gb game from steam on my 120mb internet. I recently tried a pair of homeplug adapters and my bedroom PC downloads so much faster now. 6gb games now only take 20-30 minutes, I have now ordered another 2 pair of homeplug adapter for my main PC and media pc.
For people who may not know what homeplug adapters are or do. There pretty much like having a 50ft ethernet trailing across your home just so you can connect your bedroom pc or laptop to your downstairs router. Instead of using wifi. But having homeplug adapters takes away that 50ft ethernet cable and runs via your home electrical wiring.
The likely cause of your slow downloads over wifi was that it sounds like you were using Wireless G (or below) which can only transmit at 54Mbps. This could be due to the adapter or wireless acess point just simply being old. A good wireless N signal will almost always outpace powerline.
Powerline is good as it usually has less latency than wireless. But when compared against the newer wireless standards (N and AC) it just can't keep up. Unfortunaltey it is also at the mercy of your house hold wiring.
In our old house (a 25 year old barn conversion) I tested wireless and could get around 150Mbps. However our newer house (4 year old barn conversion) only achieves 50-60Mbps and also has two circuit breaker boxes. This stops powerline going from one half of the house to the other.
If you want all out speed, tradtional gigabit ethernet is always fastest (unless wirelss AC achieves its specifications). Powerline was better before wireless greatly improved with its last two revisions.
So in my mind: (in order of what i'd use currently)
Where i live i had my pc behind a concrete wall and i was using a wifi solution for about a year. It was the most irritating thing in the world. I also had driver issues with every adapter would be have funny and not connect, my signal strength was 65-72mbps. I finally upgraded to a powerline kit and I now have a much more stable connection still its not as good as having a direct CAT connection and loading pages will stall some times but its much better than before. my ping on speed test stayed the same @26-30 ms
One of them was a wireless G but the 2 USB ones I tried and the pci one was 300mbps was ok but not that great. homeplugs/powerlines just made using my bedroom PC so much better.