10 ms·

Best thing I did was wire my house with cat6, so my TV, computer, server, security cam, nas and printer are all wired. Its so worth the effort. Wifi is now for

by rb808 8y ago

Best thing I did was wire my house with cat6, so my TV, computer, server, security cam, nas and printer are all wired. Its so worth the effort. Wifi is now for a rarely used laptop and phones.

sergius 8y ago
Don't forget Ethernet over Power... works great on some houses and you don't need to lay out cables. But if you can nothing beats wiring the hole house.
- josteink 8y ago
  In my experience this works worse in newer houses with modern (more complex, less transparent) electrical systems, and at best you get sub-WiFi speeds. You have little to lose by trying, but there’s no guarantee it will work at all, even less work well.
  - gameswithgo 8y ago
    It has improved a lot in the last few years, in case your experience was from a few years ago.
  - PaulHoule 8y ago
    I have a very old house and it works well for me. I think you do best to have just two stations in a powerline network situation because the contention and overhead of contention control is much less. (Compare that to gigabit ethernet which is full duplex and switched so there is little or no contention) You can connect a "distant" powerline NIC to an ethernet switch and plug multiple devices into that if they are close together, that works better than plugging in multiple powerline NICs. Unfortunately new houses have circuit breakers that detect broadband noise caused by arcing. These are good for catching fires early, but will blow if you use powerline NICs.
    - mcguire 8y ago
      I have an older house that has been expanded several times, with some rather amateurish wiring. One outlet works, the one next to it doesn't. Slow speed, interruptions that require resets... Google wifi pucks work much better, in spite of the cinder block walls.
  - visiblink 8y ago
    Like PaulHoule, I have an old house, but with a new electrical system. It was proudly rewired by yours truly, with GFIs and AFCIs all over -- and an added subpanel. Anyways, I use a set of powerline adapters with a second wifi router at the other end because the walls in my house are very thick (the studs are covered in shiplap on both sides). The throughput is fast enough to stream video on the other end, but I haven't put it to any measured test. In the summer, I often take the whole setup to one of the outdoor plugins, so that we have solid wifi on the deck. So it can work quite well. Whether it will in any given circumstance is uncertain I suppose.
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    Seconded - if you're going to try Powerline networking, buy your equipment from a retailer with a generous returns policy.
  - ip26 8y ago
    The theoretical throughput is lower, but I found the real-world performance for network filesystem access specifically was wildly superior. Never determined exactly why- latency? dropped packets? but 10-20mbps powerline links mopped the floor with 200mbps wifi links, even with only a two foot airgap. (These weren't label-advertised speeds, these were the negotiated links)
- Dirlewanger 8y ago
  Used this for a couple years since the wireless sginal was weak where my room was, and using a 500 MB/s device was decent. Though a couple times a week it would randomly drop out for several minutes which required unplugging/plugging back in the device. Not sure if it was due to the wiring of the house or what; it seems like it'd be a hard problem to troubleshoot. The Powerline standard has only gotten better though with time. As little as ~7 years ago there were only 50 MB/s devices. They now have gigabit-level ones.
- vvanders 8y ago
  Gah, don't do that if you value your RF spectrum. Those types of devices should be banned as they turn the untwisted electrical lines in your house into a giant set it antennas. If you have any ham radio neighbors ethernet over power is basically a jammer.
  - rujuladanh 8y ago
    Do they increase the actual power emitted or just create interference? i.e. should one be concerned health-wise if many of those are used? (assuming one believes in RF in these frequencies being harmful).
    - kakarot 8y ago
      It's kind of a pointless question. If you believe RF can hurt you, it has no bearing on the fact that it can't and doesn't.
      - justatdotin 8y ago
        well, high enough levels of RF (ie, well above routine public exposure) can burn.
        kakarot 8y ago
        Sure, and if you stare into a focused microwave emitter you'll cook your brains. That's like saying light is harmful because looking directly at the sun or a high-powered laser will blind you. Focused beams are outside the scope of this question because we're dealing with cell transmitters.
- rbanffy 8y ago
  I do that because the house is rented and I can't make holes, but the ethernet ports lose connection far more often than I'd like.
- linsomniac 8y ago
  I thought about doing either powerline networking or CATV cable. We have CATV to every room and aren't using it. After some research, the speed and reliability seemed quite questionable. I'd prefer to run Ethernet, but one portion of my house, the part that has most of the devices, is really hard to wire to my standards. I should probably just find a pro to do that run, or bite the bullet and either do some drywall work or put up some crown molding to get that run. I'm afraid I won't know where to stop though. :-) If I'm gonna do drywall work in the spare bedroom, I might as well pull it ALL down. If I do that, I might as well run some more power circuits, seal the HVAC ducting. I might as well remodel that closet. Which might mean taking space from the closet for the basement bathroom and laundry. etc... I have an illness. :-)
  - frosted-flakes 8y ago
    Nah, you're totally normal. Renovating is like opening a can of worms. No matter what happens, the scope of the project will always balloon once you find out what inside the walls.
    - lutorm 8y ago
      Our house has single-wall construction, so I'm immune to that illness. There is, by definition, nothing hidden in the walls. ;-)
  - hinkley 8y ago
    Stuff like this, water damage and insulation make me think we are putting walls together wrong. I have no idea what the solution is but this is the pits.
    - throwmeback 8y ago
      I remember finding out Americans build walls differently than Europe. The stories about finding insect nests in walls sound insane for me to this day.
      - 8y ago
- wallflower 8y ago
  No one here has heard about Ethernet over Coax? MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance) http://www.mocalliance.org/ http://www.mocalliance.org/ MoCA 2.0 allows theoretical speeds of up to 500 Mbps (1 Gbps if bonded). This allows real world speeds of 1/2 to 2/3 of that. Many houses have cable outlets. https://www.pcworld.com/article/2950015/powerline-vs-moca-which-alternative-networking-technology-is-the-best.amp.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2950015/powerline-vs-moca-wh...
  - js2 8y ago
    Everything old is new again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5 But no, I hadn't heard of it. (I realize the impedance and signaling is obviously different.)
  - devonkim 8y ago
    MoCA adapters are much more expensive compared to typical Ethernet adapters in general but work in a pinch. I've moved frequently and have lived in older houses so I'm now armed with two different powerline Ethernet adapters, a pair of bonded MoCA 2.0 adapters (one is already included if you have a STB from a cable provider technically but the Ethernet port on it may not be a passthrough or bridge connection), and a Ubiquiti based setup. While the best option outside of direct CAT5+ cabling is the MoCA adapter setup, I'm disappointed that in most older homes with pretty awful wiring I can still only get 600 Mbps maximum. I know it's the house's cabling because in my previous house I used the same adapters and got a clear 850 Mbps for a slightly longer cable distance. Sometimes a signal booster [1] helps but tends to boost the wrong frequencies if you buy the cheaper ones that were meant for older, analog broadcast in a home. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Splitter-Signal-Booster-Amplifier-Integrated/dp/B01A6J4H1M https://www.amazon.com/Splitter-Signal-Booster-Amplifier-Int...
- drewg123 8y ago
  Watch out for latency issues if you use Sonos and perhaps other wireless speaker systems. I used ethernet over power myself for several years when I rented a house, and it worked well for me. Recently, a friend was having wifi trouble (old house, thick plaster faraday cage walls). I suggested ethernet over power, and it worked great with one exception: They have Sonos speakers, and Sonos just would not work with it. They apparently are very sensitive to latency. The ping times were roughly 50ms (from memory) between the 2 ethernet over power adapters.. I guess Sonos takes synchronization quite seriously.
  - reportingsjr 8y ago
    What sort of PoE adapters was your friend using? PoE adapters should add minimal latency as they just use a center tapped ethernet transformer to separate the DC power from the AC ethernet signal.
    - donatzsky 8y ago
      He's talking about Powerline networking, not PoE. Powerline networks (Powerline AV and g.hn) send ethernet through the electrical wiring.
      - reportingsjr 8y ago
        Of course! I'm so used to PoE that power line networking didn't cross my mind. Thanks for the correction.
- henryfjordan 8y ago
  One time I tried using these. The internet worked fine but connections to other things on my network was very intermittent. I found out that I was switching between my own router and my neighbor's. The signal was traveling out of my house and into my neighbor's over the power lines. I do not recommend Ethernet over Power any more.
  - sp00ls 8y ago
    I don’t understand, what you’re saying doesn’t really make any sense. Were they also using Ethernet over power devices? Even so they typically have a setup process that negotiate the encryption keys between devices in your own home.
  - maxsilver 8y ago
    > The signal was traveling out of my house and into my neighbor's over the power lines. I do not recommend Ethernet over Power any more. For what it's worth, you could turn on the built-in encryption within most Powerline adapters. (Usually a button labeled "Security" or similar). Then you can leak anything you want, and still be reasonably safe. http://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/PL1200/202-11566-01powerline_1200_user_manual13Jan2015.pdf http://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/PL1200/202-11566-... Wi-fi has this exact same problem, with basically the same solution.
josteink 8y ago
I bought a new house, and for me, this was part of the spec too. Modern WiFi is getting better, but for some things you just can’t beat good, old-fashioned wires.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
If you buy a house before wiring for network was common, you can check the phone outlets. A lot of homes use Cat 5 for the phone cable so those outlets can be repurposed for networking.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  With the right modems, you can run ethernet over any spare length of twisted pair or coax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.hn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.hn
  - triangleman 8y ago
    That's very interesting, thank you. I have the cat5e throughout the house but in a ring topology as it was wired for phones only. RIght now I just have two points connected end to end. Next step is to think of a clever way to use the 2 unused pairs to support another 100BaseT and create a fake hub and spoke topology. This G.hn standard might be a good way to get even more performance out of this setup.
  - tinus_hn 8y ago
    Makes sense considering you can get (A)DSL over the same kind of cables.
  - madrix999 8y ago
    Never knew that was a thing, i definitely need to try it out now
  - kylek 8y ago
    Another (albeit, terrible) solution is HomePlug[0]. I once had broadband installed in an apartment and was provided with a couple cheap "ethernet over power" wallworts. I think the tech has improved, but they seemed to get a massive amount of interference (I think they capped out at like 65mbps?). I think I lost connections whenever the microwave was turned on. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug (edit: just noticed "ethernet over power" mentioned in another comment here. Same thing)
jubjubbird 8y ago
I had everything wired until a lightning strike took out everything connected to the router (tv, avr, PC). Now everything that can be connected by Wi-Fi is. I also added a grounding rod to the coax service entrance, knock on wood...
- andromeduck 8y ago
  Wouldn't it be cheaper to just get a lightning rod and some isolation?
  - js2 8y ago
    Yeah I tried that route after losing equipment over my broadband cable connection. Didn’t help. Next major lightning strike and I lost more Ethernet equipment. I’ve since isolated my equipment from my ISP’s with a pair of fiber adapters. I’m also on AT&T fiber now instead of coax (but the ONT is outside and Ethernet runs from it to the AT&T RG inside). Ethernet ports seem to be really sensitive (HDMI too) and it’s possible a current is being induced in them from some other path. I’ll find out this summer. (I live in NC which has the second highest number of lightning strikes in the US after FL.) Edit: just realized you wrote lighting rod. You actually would need a lightning protection system which is multiple rods properly installed and grounded. It isn’t a DIY thing to install and I’ve been told is not cheap. Also probably doesn’t help with nearby strikes, only keeps your house from burning down from a direct strike. I’ve also installed a couple type 2 surge protectors.
    - dmix 8y ago
      What kind of building do you live in where this occurred? An older house?
      - js2 8y ago
        Nope, two story home w/basement built in 2004. It’s at the high point in the neighborhood. I’ve had the grounding rod checked. I think I’ve just been really unlucky. I’ve lost networking gear two or three times (which I believe was actually via the cable modem) and the most recent strike 2 years ago took out circuit boards in an A/C unit, a separate air handler/furnace, one of my garage door openers, and an arc-fault circuit breaker in one of my panel. That last strike was the first time I had more than a few hundred dollars of damage and enough to claim against my home owners policy. This is since 2004. And we get a lot of lightning storms here in the summer. I grew up in S Florida and I don't recall getting lightning storms as frequently or as violently as here.

by rb808 8y ago

Best thing I did was wire my house with cat6, so my TV, computer, server, security cam, nas and printer are all wired. Its so worth the effort. Wifi is now for a rarely used laptop and phones.

sergius 8y ago

Don't forget Ethernet over Power... works great on some houses and you don't need to lay out cables. But if you can nothing beats wiring the hole house.

josteink 8y ago
In my experience this works worse in newer houses with modern (more complex, less transparent) electrical systems, and at best you get sub-WiFi speeds. You have little to lose by trying, but there’s no guarantee it will work at all, even less work well.
- gameswithgo 8y ago
  It has improved a lot in the last few years, in case your experience was from a few years ago.
- PaulHoule 8y ago
  I have a very old house and it works well for me. I think you do best to have just two stations in a powerline network situation because the contention and overhead of contention control is much less. (Compare that to gigabit ethernet which is full duplex and switched so there is little or no contention) You can connect a "distant" powerline NIC to an ethernet switch and plug multiple devices into that if they are close together, that works better than plugging in multiple powerline NICs. Unfortunately new houses have circuit breakers that detect broadband noise caused by arcing. These are good for catching fires early, but will blow if you use powerline NICs.
  - mcguire 8y ago
    I have an older house that has been expanded several times, with some rather amateurish wiring. One outlet works, the one next to it doesn't. Slow speed, interruptions that require resets... Google wifi pucks work much better, in spite of the cinder block walls.
- visiblink 8y ago
  Like PaulHoule, I have an old house, but with a new electrical system. It was proudly rewired by yours truly, with GFIs and AFCIs all over -- and an added subpanel. Anyways, I use a set of powerline adapters with a second wifi router at the other end because the walls in my house are very thick (the studs are covered in shiplap on both sides). The throughput is fast enough to stream video on the other end, but I haven't put it to any measured test. In the summer, I often take the whole setup to one of the outdoor plugins, so that we have solid wifi on the deck. So it can work quite well. Whether it will in any given circumstance is uncertain I suppose.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  Seconded - if you're going to try Powerline networking, buy your equipment from a retailer with a generous returns policy.
- ip26 8y ago
  The theoretical throughput is lower, but I found the real-world performance for network filesystem access specifically was wildly superior. Never determined exactly why- latency? dropped packets? but 10-20mbps powerline links mopped the floor with 200mbps wifi links, even with only a two foot airgap. (These weren't label-advertised speeds, these were the negotiated links)
Dirlewanger 8y ago
Used this for a couple years since the wireless sginal was weak where my room was, and using a 500 MB/s device was decent. Though a couple times a week it would randomly drop out for several minutes which required unplugging/plugging back in the device. Not sure if it was due to the wiring of the house or what; it seems like it'd be a hard problem to troubleshoot. The Powerline standard has only gotten better though with time. As little as ~7 years ago there were only 50 MB/s devices. They now have gigabit-level ones.
vvanders 8y ago
Gah, don't do that if you value your RF spectrum. Those types of devices should be banned as they turn the untwisted electrical lines in your house into a giant set it antennas. If you have any ham radio neighbors ethernet over power is basically a jammer.
- rujuladanh 8y ago
  Do they increase the actual power emitted or just create interference? i.e. should one be concerned health-wise if many of those are used? (assuming one believes in RF in these frequencies being harmful).
  - kakarot 8y ago
    It's kind of a pointless question. If you believe RF can hurt you, it has no bearing on the fact that it can't and doesn't.
    - justatdotin 8y ago
      well, high enough levels of RF (ie, well above routine public exposure) can burn.
      - kakarot 8y ago
        Sure, and if you stare into a focused microwave emitter you'll cook your brains. That's like saying light is harmful because looking directly at the sun or a high-powered laser will blind you. Focused beams are outside the scope of this question because we're dealing with cell transmitters.
rbanffy 8y ago
I do that because the house is rented and I can't make holes, but the ethernet ports lose connection far more often than I'd like.
linsomniac 8y ago
I thought about doing either powerline networking or CATV cable. We have CATV to every room and aren't using it. After some research, the speed and reliability seemed quite questionable. I'd prefer to run Ethernet, but one portion of my house, the part that has most of the devices, is really hard to wire to my standards. I should probably just find a pro to do that run, or bite the bullet and either do some drywall work or put up some crown molding to get that run. I'm afraid I won't know where to stop though. :-) If I'm gonna do drywall work in the spare bedroom, I might as well pull it ALL down. If I do that, I might as well run some more power circuits, seal the HVAC ducting. I might as well remodel that closet. Which might mean taking space from the closet for the basement bathroom and laundry. etc... I have an illness. :-)
- frosted-flakes 8y ago
  Nah, you're totally normal. Renovating is like opening a can of worms. No matter what happens, the scope of the project will always balloon once you find out what inside the walls.
  - lutorm 8y ago
    Our house has single-wall construction, so I'm immune to that illness. There is, by definition, nothing hidden in the walls. ;-)
- hinkley 8y ago
  Stuff like this, water damage and insulation make me think we are putting walls together wrong. I have no idea what the solution is but this is the pits.
  - throwmeback 8y ago
    I remember finding out Americans build walls differently than Europe. The stories about finding insect nests in walls sound insane for me to this day.
    - 8y ago
wallflower 8y ago
No one here has heard about Ethernet over Coax? MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance) http://www.mocalliance.org/ http://www.mocalliance.org/ MoCA 2.0 allows theoretical speeds of up to 500 Mbps (1 Gbps if bonded). This allows real world speeds of 1/2 to 2/3 of that. Many houses have cable outlets. https://www.pcworld.com/article/2950015/powerline-vs-moca-which-alternative-networking-technology-is-the-best.amp.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2950015/powerline-vs-moca-wh...
- js2 8y ago
  Everything old is new again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5 But no, I hadn't heard of it. (I realize the impedance and signaling is obviously different.)
- devonkim 8y ago
  MoCA adapters are much more expensive compared to typical Ethernet adapters in general but work in a pinch. I've moved frequently and have lived in older houses so I'm now armed with two different powerline Ethernet adapters, a pair of bonded MoCA 2.0 adapters (one is already included if you have a STB from a cable provider technically but the Ethernet port on it may not be a passthrough or bridge connection), and a Ubiquiti based setup. While the best option outside of direct CAT5+ cabling is the MoCA adapter setup, I'm disappointed that in most older homes with pretty awful wiring I can still only get 600 Mbps maximum. I know it's the house's cabling because in my previous house I used the same adapters and got a clear 850 Mbps for a slightly longer cable distance. Sometimes a signal booster [1] helps but tends to boost the wrong frequencies if you buy the cheaper ones that were meant for older, analog broadcast in a home. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Splitter-Signal-Booster-Amplifier-Integrated/dp/B01A6J4H1M https://www.amazon.com/Splitter-Signal-Booster-Amplifier-Int...
drewg123 8y ago
Watch out for latency issues if you use Sonos and perhaps other wireless speaker systems. I used ethernet over power myself for several years when I rented a house, and it worked well for me. Recently, a friend was having wifi trouble (old house, thick plaster faraday cage walls). I suggested ethernet over power, and it worked great with one exception: They have Sonos speakers, and Sonos just would not work with it. They apparently are very sensitive to latency. The ping times were roughly 50ms (from memory) between the 2 ethernet over power adapters.. I guess Sonos takes synchronization quite seriously.
- reportingsjr 8y ago
  What sort of PoE adapters was your friend using? PoE adapters should add minimal latency as they just use a center tapped ethernet transformer to separate the DC power from the AC ethernet signal.
  - donatzsky 8y ago
    He's talking about Powerline networking, not PoE. Powerline networks (Powerline AV and g.hn) send ethernet through the electrical wiring.
    - reportingsjr 8y ago
      Of course! I'm so used to PoE that power line networking didn't cross my mind. Thanks for the correction.
henryfjordan 8y ago
One time I tried using these. The internet worked fine but connections to other things on my network was very intermittent. I found out that I was switching between my own router and my neighbor's. The signal was traveling out of my house and into my neighbor's over the power lines. I do not recommend Ethernet over Power any more.
- sp00ls 8y ago
  I don’t understand, what you’re saying doesn’t really make any sense. Were they also using Ethernet over power devices? Even so they typically have a setup process that negotiate the encryption keys between devices in your own home.
- maxsilver 8y ago
  > The signal was traveling out of my house and into my neighbor's over the power lines. I do not recommend Ethernet over Power any more. For what it's worth, you could turn on the built-in encryption within most Powerline adapters. (Usually a button labeled "Security" or similar). Then you can leak anything you want, and still be reasonably safe. http://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/PL1200/202-11566-01powerline_1200_user_manual13Jan2015.pdf http://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/PL1200/202-11566-... Wi-fi has this exact same problem, with basically the same solution.

josteink 8y ago

I bought a new house, and for me, this was part of the spec too. Modern WiFi is getting better, but for some things you just can’t beat good, old-fashioned wires.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago

If you buy a house before wiring for network was common, you can check the phone outlets. A lot of homes use Cat 5 for the phone cable so those outlets can be repurposed for networking.

jdietrich 8y ago
With the right modems, you can run ethernet over any spare length of twisted pair or coax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.hn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.hn
- triangleman 8y ago
  That's very interesting, thank you. I have the cat5e throughout the house but in a ring topology as it was wired for phones only. RIght now I just have two points connected end to end. Next step is to think of a clever way to use the 2 unused pairs to support another 100BaseT and create a fake hub and spoke topology. This G.hn standard might be a good way to get even more performance out of this setup.
- tinus_hn 8y ago
  Makes sense considering you can get (A)DSL over the same kind of cables.
- madrix999 8y ago
  Never knew that was a thing, i definitely need to try it out now
- kylek 8y ago
  Another (albeit, terrible) solution is HomePlug[0]. I once had broadband installed in an apartment and was provided with a couple cheap "ethernet over power" wallworts. I think the tech has improved, but they seemed to get a massive amount of interference (I think they capped out at like 65mbps?). I think I lost connections whenever the microwave was turned on. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug (edit: just noticed "ethernet over power" mentioned in another comment here. Same thing)

jubjubbird 8y ago

I had everything wired until a lightning strike took out everything connected to the router (tv, avr, PC). Now everything that can be connected by Wi-Fi is. I also added a grounding rod to the coax service entrance, knock on wood...

andromeduck 8y ago
Wouldn't it be cheaper to just get a lightning rod and some isolation?
- js2 8y ago
  Yeah I tried that route after losing equipment over my broadband cable connection. Didn’t help. Next major lightning strike and I lost more Ethernet equipment. I’ve since isolated my equipment from my ISP’s with a pair of fiber adapters. I’m also on AT&T fiber now instead of coax (but the ONT is outside and Ethernet runs from it to the AT&T RG inside). Ethernet ports seem to be really sensitive (HDMI too) and it’s possible a current is being induced in them from some other path. I’ll find out this summer. (I live in NC which has the second highest number of lightning strikes in the US after FL.) Edit: just realized you wrote lighting rod. You actually would need a lightning protection system which is multiple rods properly installed and grounded. It isn’t a DIY thing to install and I’ve been told is not cheap. Also probably doesn’t help with nearby strikes, only keeps your house from burning down from a direct strike. I’ve also installed a couple type 2 surge protectors.
  - dmix 8y ago
    What kind of building do you live in where this occurred? An older house?
    - js2 8y ago
      Nope, two story home w/basement built in 2004. It’s at the high point in the neighborhood. I’ve had the grounding rod checked. I think I’ve just been really unlucky. I’ve lost networking gear two or three times (which I believe was actually via the cable modem) and the most recent strike 2 years ago took out circuit boards in an A/C unit, a separate air handler/furnace, one of my garage door openers, and an arc-fault circuit breaker in one of my panel. That last strike was the first time I had more than a few hundred dollars of damage and enough to claim against my home owners policy. This is since 2004. And we get a lot of lightning storms here in the summer. I grew up in S Florida and I don't recall getting lightning storms as frequently or as violently as here.