Hello!
I know this is a long forgotten thread but I think I may have gotten to the bottom of the problem.
I was having more-or-less the same issues as OP. I have two PH3 adaptors and they have been working great for about 8 months now. I recently bought two PH6 adaptors for a home lab project and to get a better internet connection upstairs in our house.
The new PH6s seemed to be working fine at first - ping of around 5ms to the downstairs router. After leaving them for a while though, the ping would start averaging over 150ms and internet speed would slow to a crawl. This would be anywhere from 10 minutes to a few hours after resetting / un-plugging and re-plugging. After they were reset, the speeds would be fine again until the suddenly they'd hit the 150ms+ average ping again.
After days (nights) of pinging, moving adaptors from plug socket to plug socket, methodically turning off electricals around the house and searching the net for answers I found that Tenda have a tool for configuring their powerline adaptors (02 - PLC Management Software) available here:
Search Results
www.tendacn.com
I was hoping there would be some options to turn off power-saving mode which by this point I'd assumed was the problem. Instead, when looking at each of the 4 adaptors in the management tool it showed that the original PH3 adaptors were running firmware version 3.2.2 and the newer PH6 adaptors were running a later firmware version, 3.2.4.
I managed to source the older firmware version here:
PH3
www.tendacn.com
And used the management tool to flash the PH6s back to 3.2.2. I'm hoping I'm not celebrating too soon but it seems to have done the trick - with pings consistently at regular PH3 levels for 2 days now where previously they'd rarely last the hour.
As for OP's original post - could it be that their PH6s auto-updated to the later firmware version and caused the initial issues (are these even capable of updating themselves)? Any further PH6s received from Tenda would then also have had the bugged 3.2.4 version. Not entirely sure why there aren't more people complaining about these adaptors - possibly it's a memory-leak type issue (as suggested by someone else) that's only brought about when they're coping with specific wiring?
Anyway - hopefully this post will prevent anyone with these adaptors from days of searching for answers! Would be good to know if rolling back the firmware fixes anybody else's PH6s.