Solwise Piggy6 review

At first glance, Solwise's Piggy6 looks like a bizarre spinning-top. It's unlikely to entertain even the most easily pleased child, but it's one of the most useful powerline networking adaptors we've seen.

Built into the adaptor are six surge-protected power sockets, a three-port Ethernet switch and HomePlug AV 200Mbit/s powerline networking, so you can create a network using your existing wiring. With the use of a single wall socket, you can expand the number of power sockets available to you and plug in three wired networking devices.

The Piggy6 is a useful product if you have lots of networked devices, such as a network media player, games console and Blu-ray player next to your TV. You'll just need another HomePlug AV adaptor connected to your router.

You may be wondering why you can't simply use HomePlug adaptors with an existing surge protector. Unfortunately, surge protectors cut out the networking signal, stopping the network from working. HomePlug adaptors can be connected to standard power strips, but this often results in incredibly slow network speeds. By building all this into a single unit, Solwise has ensured that each component works as it should.

As a multi-way power socket, the Piggy6 does a great job. Its hexagonal shape means you can plug large power adaptors into each socket without blocking other sockets, as often happens with standard power strips. There's a big power button that allows you to switch off power to all the sockets, so you can save money by preventing your electrical devices drawing power on standby.

The three Ethernet ports are connected to a switch that runs at 100Mbit/s, so you can get full-speed transfers between any connected devices. We achieved 93Mbit/s in our file-transfer test. The last HomePlug adaptor we saw with multiple ports, VeseNET's 3x Ethernet Adaptor (What's New, Shopper 233), used the HomePlug standard for communication between its three ports and gave us speeds of just 53Mbit/s. Using HomePlug to connect the Piggy6 to a Solwise NET-PL-200AV-PUSH adaptor (£36 including VAT) saw impressive speeds of 61Mbit/s.

The Piggy6 has push-button security. Just hit the button on this and one of the other adaptors in your home and the connection is automatically secured. If you don't have push-button security elsewhere, the supplied software lets you set encryption manually.

The Piggy6 is a fantastic HomePlug AV adaptor that's perfect for anyone who has more than one network device located close together. It's great value, too, considering that you'd have to spend a similar amount on separate components (surge protector, pass-through HomePlug AV adaptor and Ethernet switch) to piece together your own, untidy-looking version.