10 ms·

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 7y 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 7y ago
  It has improved a lot in the last few years, in case your experience was from a few years ago.
- PaulHoule 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
  Seconded - if you're going to try Powerline networking, buy your equipment from a retailer with a generous returns policy.
- ip26 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
      well, high enough levels of RF (ie, well above routine public exposure) can burn.
      - kakarot 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
    Our house has single-wall construction, so I'm immune to that illness. There is, by definition, nothing hidden in the walls. ;-)
- hinkley 7y 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 7y 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.
    - 7y ago
wallflower 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
    He's talking about Powerline networking, not PoE. Powerline networks (Powerline AV and g.hn) send ethernet through the electrical wiring.
    - reportingsjr 7y ago
      Of course! I'm so used to PoE that power line networking didn't cross my mind. Thanks for the correction.
henryfjordan 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
It has improved a lot in the last few years, in case your experience was from a few years ago.
PaulHoule 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
Seconded - if you're going to try Powerline networking, buy your equipment from a retailer with a generous returns policy.
ip26 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
    well, high enough levels of RF (ie, well above routine public exposure) can burn.
    - kakarot 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
  Our house has single-wall construction, so I'm immune to that illness. There is, by definition, nothing hidden in the walls. ;-)
hinkley 7y 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 7y 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.
  - 7y ago

wallflower 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
  He's talking about Powerline networking, not PoE. Powerline networks (Powerline AV and g.hn) send ethernet through the electrical wiring.
  - reportingsjr 7y ago
    Of course! I'm so used to PoE that power line networking didn't cross my mind. Thanks for the correction.

henryfjordan 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.