7 ms·

Why are there no PowerLine Smart Plugs?

41 points by raybb 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
andershaig 3y ago
This is my first time hearing about PowerLine. Has anyone used it extensively and have any tips and tricks to share? Wikipedia[1] lists some pros and cons but it's not clear how impactful those cons are in real world scenarios. How does the speed compare to Wifi? Do multiple devices cause issues? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-line_communication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-line_communication
- sokoloff 3y ago
  I have it deployed in my attic (one sender in basement, one receiver in attic) because so far I’ve been too lazy to pull Cat6 up there. I get about 35Mbps and it’s a little flaky, but I haven’t tried to troubleshoot it. It serves my minimal use case (streaming to a very rarely used guest bedroom TV). I’d use anything else in most cases (including pulling fiber to my detached garage rather than using power line to galvanically isolate the networks). I’ve not tested it, but my understanding is that powerline networking will not pass (or pass well) a surge suppressor (which might be a problem if you have an updated electrical panel with whole house suppression).
- cj 3y ago
  I've used powerline once or twice, but I'm a heavy user of MoCa. It's basically the same thing except ethernet over Coax cable. My use case is creating wired backhauls for mesh wifi system (or adding wired AP's where stringing ethernet isn't practical)
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  Powerline ethernet is a decent alternative to ethernet cables or wireless, but there definitely are significant caveats: * It generates tons of electrical noise, which can wreak havoc on electronics particularly radios. * The actual connection speed varies greatly by the condition of the copper wiring and generally isn't that great. * Depending on how the copper wiring is laid out, you might not get a connection between two points. * Security can be an issue if you don't configure your powerline adapters properly.
- solardev 3y ago
  They've been very useful in situations where wifi didn't go far enough. I find them to be more reliable and faster than wifi mesh networks, up to a few hundred megabits. They do come in different speed ratings though, and those still depend on the condition of your house wiring. Buy them from somewhere with a good return policy and give em a shot. Moca is another option if you have coax wiring for cable TV in your house. That's nice cuz it doesn't share bandwidth with power lines.
- vvanders 3y ago
  Hams hate them since they induce RFI, I'm honestly surprised they are allowed given they basically turn the unshielded wire in your walls into antennas.
  - graphe 3y ago
    Will ham licensing die? The average age is like 60-70 usually, the government kept lowering the requirements to get a license and it's even less popular. I heard they're usually mostly benchmarking distance and truckers listening. Besides apocalypse or maybe wanting to tunnel data through it (illegal) it doesn't seem to serve a real function or benefit. Family radio and the public channels I heard are full of useless chatter and insults, I can't imagine radio being any better than the internet besides the idea of broadcasting data on it which the government doesn't like. Because it runs on tattletales that tell the government, if they removed the licensing we'd just get the ability to not illegally (maybe dirty) encrypted long distance messages anonymously. A far superior system than today's.
    - bityard 3y ago
      I do quite enjoy when non-hams hop on the Internet to try and criticize ham radio. > The average age is like 60-70 usually I can't find any statistics on the average age among all amateur radio license holders. Wikipedia says the average age is 68, but that is marked with a [citation needed] because it doesn't point to a source. Whoever wrote that likely got it from the ARRL which declared that the average age of their membership is 68. Not all hams, and perhaps not even the majority of hams, are members of ARRL. In the same way that not all licensed gun owners are members of the NRA. In rural areas, you may find the local ham radio club is a clique of 5 or 6 older guys who have known each other for several decades and aren't too welcoming to newcomers. But more urban areas are a completely different story. Where I live, the local university has a ham club operated by college students. There is a community club that certainly _trends_ toward older engineer retirees, but actually has members of all ages, ethnicities, and technical background. And they are all a pretty friendly bunch. There are online clubs and communities for various demographics as well. (And an uncountable number of discords for some reason.) > the government kept lowering the requirements to get a license and it's even less popular. The only ones saying that are YouTubers and clickbait SEO-encumbered blogspam. There are more amateur radio license holders now than there have ever been. http://ah0a.org/FCC/Graphs.html http://ah0a.org/FCC/Graphs.html > I heard they're usually mostly benchmarking distance and truckers listening. You must have heard wrong? I don't know what "benchmarking distance" means, and while there _are_ truckers that are hams and sometimes talk while they drive, IME there are not many. Certainly not enough to be a notable chunk of local ham radio activity. > Besides apocalypse or maybe wanting to tunnel data through it (illegal) it doesn't seem to serve a real function or benefit. You could ask the FCC, the ones who license and regulate the service? https://www.fcc.gov/wireless/bureau-divisions/mobility-division/amateur-radio-service https://www.fcc.gov/wireless/bureau-divisions/mobility-divis... "The amateur radio ... services are for qualified persons of any age who are interested in radio technique solely with a personal aim and without pecuniary interest. These services present an opportunity for self-training, intercommunication, and technical investigations." In short, amateur radio is set of spectrum set aside for hobbyists to practice and experiment with radio. Amateur radio can be and has been used to coordinate communication in areas stricken by disaster when other services were down, but it is NOT an "emergency radio" service, no matter what the preppers say. Encryption on the ham bands is forbidden for a very good reason: ham radio activities are public, open, and are not a substitute for commercial or ISM bands. You don't need encryption in order to experiment with radio. It's a different layer, completely orthogonal. The only narrow acceptable use related to cryptography is authorization of control messages to repeaters, RC aircraft, and such. In that case, you are not obscuring the meaning of the message, you are simply proving that you are the rightful controller of the device. > Family radio and the public channels I heard are full of useless chatter and insults, FRS and CB radio are not ham radio, full stop. I have never seen a single community anywhere in real life or on the Internet that didn't have the occasional asshat or two. Although a few hams can be idiots, as in any community, the majority are quite respectful and friendly. > I can't imagine radio being any better than the internet besides the idea of broadcasting data on it which the government doesn't like. As mentioned before, you're missing the purpose and spirit of amateur radio. It's not "free and libre wireless communication for the masses." The spectrum was originally set aside by the FCC at a time when amateurs were making more progress on the state of the art of radio technology on their kitchen tables than radio manufacturers with whole labs. Not as relevant today perhaps, but it's a miracle that we still have that spectrum available to us when these frequencies are so highly coveted by HFTs, ISPs, and mobile phone operators. Broadcasting on amateur radio is not allowed, because there are already FCC-licensed services for broadcasting over radio. Some people think that broadcasting over amateur radio should be allowed because they don't like the FCC's policies on the broadcast bands but that's some pretty backwards thinking, if you ask me. Nobody stumps for broadcast rights on FRS, GRMS, CB, or marine bands for some reason. It's only the amateur radio service where this is ever even suggested as a possibility, generally by people who don't understand what the service is for.
- kbouck 3y ago
  My experience with PowerLine (TPLink) was really awful. Completely unstable and inconsistent performance. We then switched to MoCA (ActionTec) and it has been about as good as a direct ethernet cable. Consistent performance and stays up for years at a time. No issues ever. The performance of each likely comes down to how much noice is on the respective wires. Our electrical network is likely crowded and influenced somewhat by neighbors. However our coax was completely unused and I disconnected it from the outside world (for privacy and noise reduction) If you have coax outlets in locations useful for networking, I would definitely consider using MoCA instead of PowerLine.
- bdavbdav 3y ago
  I think I’m one of the few that have had great luck with it. We’ve got an outbuilding which is on a separate circuit than the ring main in the house which has the other end. It still gets a solid 120mbps and no meaningful packet loss, dropouts etc.
cj 3y ago
> My personal wishlist would be for a USB-C power adapter that also provided an ethernet connection, so you could just plug a laptop in anywhere in the house no matter how congested or flaky the WiFi was there. This caught my eye. If something like that worked well without too much fuss setting it up, it would be really cool.
- woleium 3y ago
  it would, but it would also make networking a thing that electricians had to do, so is unlikely to happen anytime soon
  - solardev 3y ago
    Why would electricians have to do it? It wouldn't change the in wall circuits, just combine a powerline networking thing into the data parts of the USB c charger.
- myself248 3y ago
  Yeeeeears ago, I chopped up an early PoE splitter and grafted it into the already-super-hacked-up Toughbook I was carrying. It let me charge from PoE jacks at the same time as getting network. Immediately thereafter, I realized most of the places I went didn't have PoE PSE, but the concept was neat, anyway.
- wongarsu 3y ago
  If you did this the straightforward way, basically combining a USB power brick with an USB C GBit Ethernet adapter and a powerline adapter into one compact housing, that would be one heavy chunky $200-$300 brick. And now you don't have to worry about the flakiness of WiFi, but instead have to worry about the speed of your powerline (which can vary greatly throughout a building depending on how the wires are run). You are probably better off strategically placing wifi range extenders connected via powerline.
woleium 3y ago
likely because the bom for putting wifi on a board is $0.02 and the bom for powerline networking is probably around $8, also (not that it matters in this application, but) wifi is probably faster if its reliability in a dense (apartment complex) wifi area you are after, zigbee mesh has more resilience and is cheaper than powerline powerline networks only generally work on the same ring main.
- graphe 3y ago
  Wifi onboard is .02$? What chipset is that cheap?
- mitthrowaway2 3y ago
  $0.02 for Wifi? Using what?
- RockRobotRock 3y ago
  I'm no expert but is there anything cheaper than the ESP32/8266? Big manufacturers could probably get those for a dollar or two?
- ta988 3y ago
  eps8266 is sub $1 if you buy enough never heard of a $0.02 module.
gorgoiler 3y ago
How much risk is there, with Powerline, that my neighbours will be able to see traffic on my home network? I’ve had powerline adapters work quite happily sometimes (and unhappily other times) on separate circuits in my home so it clearly can tolerate some level of copper juncture (circuit breakers, consumer units, and the like) beyond a simple ring main. A recent unit I bought had an optional pairing process between adapters. I don’t know how it works but it is billed as a way of ensuring privacy between endpoints. It wasn’t clear from the documentation if this was to protect me from other people in my house, or from neighbouring properties.
- smileybarry 3y ago
  I think I saw neighbor devices in our Powerline setup a decade ago, since I had unrecognized computers indexed in my Network folder (and I use a desktop). Turning on the adapter's really basic 40-bit encryption was enough. That pairing process is the use of a key, yes. I think modern Powerline adapters generate a key anyway.
- gandalfian 3y ago
  Trouble shooting a relatives apartment I found the internet through his power line adapter was slow because it was connecting to an apartment four floors below... Who actually had a smarter internet connection but sadly at that distance the speed was reduced. I turned on the encryption pairings and that kept it in his own flat. He did have his own electricity meter but clearly all the flats were connected. I imagine in detatched houses less of a problem. In a large building there were literally 100+ WiFi networks visible so power line was a necessary solution rather than blasting through WiFi.
  - connicpu 3y ago
    An apartment building probably saves on cost by using one transformer for the whole building, meanwhile detached houses usually each have their own transformer to step down from the local distribution lines. I'd imagine the signals have a hard time getting through a transformer.
DannyBee 3y ago
Power line interacts badly with AFCI and other things because they essentially introduce electrical noise. That is one reason they are becoming less and less common.
InvisibleUp 3y ago
There is - it’s called the X10 Home Automation system. It’s archaic technology from the 1970s and it doesn’t do power monitoring, but you sure can turn devices on and off. EDIT: it seems the KNX standard is a more modern system that supports Powerline as well as other communication methods, although it seems to mostly be for business use.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Both the X10 and powerline are large and expensive devices because they require a big transformer to interface with the power line, any device like that is going to be more expensive than a ZigBee device.
H8crilA 3y ago
Zigbee with its meshing is extremely reliable in pretty much all home setups I could think of. It works quite a lot better than Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Therefore I am not sure it is actually needed to have a separate physical protocol which can only be accessed by smart sockets (and maybe also smart bulbs, though I'd think you need to have all of those on the same power phase first). It would work better in, I don't know, warehouses? Where the distance to the next device becomes too large.
hlandau 3y ago
This post touches on a fairly common experience for me, which is assuming a kind of product must exist and then being surprised to find a complete gap in the market. It seems quite common for a particular market to have come to "conceptualise" itself, or categorise itself, in a certain way that then becomes a prevailing set of assumptions of every company serving that market. This results in every product in a given market basically being the same and formed under the same set of assumptions, leading to a lack of meaningful choice. Examples I've encountered: - You can't get non-wireless (/non-battery-powered) noise cancelling headphones. Go on, try and find some. - The market for presentation remote controls (that is, wireless clickers for advancing to the next slide) seems to be entirely conceptualised around proprietary 2.4GHz communication with one of those tiny USB dongles. The market for Bluetooth presentation remote controls seems to be tiny, and the ones that do support Bluetooth are hybrids which support both Bluetooth and a dongle. Also weirdly expensive. - You can get Zigbee temperature/humidity sensors but getting Zigbee temperature/humidity/pressure sensors is seemingly much more niche, despite the existence of MEMS chips which can sense all of those. Zigbee temperature, humidity, pressure and CO2? Good luck. Given how neat and useful Zigbee is as a technology I'm a bit surprised more isn't done with it and a more varied set of devices aren't available for it.
- Bjartr 3y ago
  Not to counter your point, but because your said to try to find some, searching 'wired noise cancelling headphones'in Google immediately found options[1], although it was annoying to find the actually wired ones in the results, that do seem to exist. [1] e.g. https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sony-noise-canceling-wired-on-ear-headphones-black/8636734.p?skuId=8636734 https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sony-noise-canceling-wired-on-e...
  - calamari4065 3y ago
    The wired earbuds that shipped with my Samsung phone are noise canceling as well
  - hlandau 3y ago
    Those are battery powered, though. (And judging by the reviews not very good, and suspiciously cheap, so not really the same quality of product.) I spent a LONG time looking for wired noise-cancelling headphones a year or two ago without success. By this I mean headphones where the noise-cancelling electronics can be powered over USB. It seemed obvious to me to design a pair of headphones with a USB audio interface which powered noise cancelling. But nope, doesn't exist. Even worse all the wireless noise cancelling headphones I find, including high end ones, automatically turn off when you charge them. So you can't actually use them when they're charging. I'm certain companies do this due to some kind of liability paranoia about a battery igniting when someone's wearing them, but the result is that the entire product class seems to be literally designed to put an upper bound on how much you can use the product. I find this insane.
bityard 3y ago
Please don't use powerline network adapters unless you have absolutely no other reasonable choice. One house can pollute huge swaths of the RF spectrum for a whole neighborhood or beyond.
- orev 3y ago
  Agreed, but it would be helpful to mention the alternative: MoCa. It’s far more reliable, doesn’t have the interference problems, and works in most of the same scenarios where people are looking at powerline (e.g. home networks).
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
superkuh 3y ago
Good. No high speed data communications should be done through power wiring. Specifically, none of these devices should ever be approved for sale within the USA by the FCC. They emit far too much radio interference, and lots of it down in the HF bands where it propagates around the entire world. Building power wiring is never impedance controlled. It is just two parallel wires as a transmission line. Any time this unshielded line gets next to a piece of metal, or it bends too sharp, or whatever, the impedance changes in the RF frequencies significantly enough that it will radiate (and accept incoming interference by reciprocity). These devices literally fill the airwaves with interference. So why does the FCC allow them? Because for FCC testing they're allowed to use contrived setups/jigs of power wiring that are nothing like those that happen in actual buildings. FCC approval of these thing should require actual testing in actual house/building like wiring. If they did none would ever be approved and all existing ones would be taken off the market. So... yes, you can technically legally use PowerLine networking. But if you do so knowingly you're being extremely rude and a bad person. Like, throwing trash on the ground in a national park type rude. The radio spectrum is a limited shared resource. Please don't ruin it.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >No high speed data communications should be done through power wiring. It bears considering that "compromise" technologies like powerline ethernet aren't because we should, it's because we can. There's nothing technically appealing about powerline ethernet, it's always going to be inferior to simple ethernet cabling and at best a sidegrade to wireless ethernet or repurposing coax cabling or telephone wiring. Its practical appeal is the convenience of not having to run new ethernet cabling in an environment where wireless ethernet or reusing other kinds of existing wiring also aren't an option. Running new ethernet cabling can be an arduous task, especially if you want to do it nicely, and sometimes practical convenience trumps objective superiority.
  - superkuh 3y ago
    Most people I know that use powerline networking do so because they have aesthetic objections to running a little cable along the baseboards in their apartment/house. Arduous? Only if you are pulling it through the walls because of aesthetic objections to just running the cable along the wall. This "can" in this case is assuming a premise that the aesthetic appearance of your living space is more important than not littering and degrading a shared public resource. It's not. That's rude.
paradox460 3y ago
There are. They're called X10
analog31 3y ago
Not an engineer: I wonder if the ubiquitous line filters on a typical home power "network" is enough to quash a powerline data signal. I'm thinking of those knobs that are molded around power cords, and perhaps some built into appliances themselves. Anecdote: I participated in college radio, and learned that the station originated with a couple of students in a fraternity broadcasting AM radio on the power lines, in the 1950s. Two of those students became my professors. They said that in those days, the power system was so simple, that they could reach the entire town. But more modern power distribution equipment had built-in filtering that eventually forced the station to go on-air.

41 points by raybb 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

This is my first time hearing about PowerLine. Has anyone used it extensively and have any tips and tricks to share? Wikipedia[1] lists some pros and cons but it's not clear how impactful those cons are in real world scenarios. How does the speed compare to Wifi? Do multiple devices cause issues? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-line_communication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-line_communication

sokoloff 3y ago
I have it deployed in my attic (one sender in basement, one receiver in attic) because so far I’ve been too lazy to pull Cat6 up there. I get about 35Mbps and it’s a little flaky, but I haven’t tried to troubleshoot it. It serves my minimal use case (streaming to a very rarely used guest bedroom TV). I’d use anything else in most cases (including pulling fiber to my detached garage rather than using power line to galvanically isolate the networks). I’ve not tested it, but my understanding is that powerline networking will not pass (or pass well) a surge suppressor (which might be a problem if you have an updated electrical panel with whole house suppression).
cj 3y ago
I've used powerline once or twice, but I'm a heavy user of MoCa. It's basically the same thing except ethernet over Coax cable. My use case is creating wired backhauls for mesh wifi system (or adding wired AP's where stringing ethernet isn't practical)
Dalewyn 3y ago
Powerline ethernet is a decent alternative to ethernet cables or wireless, but there definitely are significant caveats: * It generates tons of electrical noise, which can wreak havoc on electronics particularly radios. * The actual connection speed varies greatly by the condition of the copper wiring and generally isn't that great. * Depending on how the copper wiring is laid out, you might not get a connection between two points. * Security can be an issue if you don't configure your powerline adapters properly.
solardev 3y ago
They've been very useful in situations where wifi didn't go far enough. I find them to be more reliable and faster than wifi mesh networks, up to a few hundred megabits. They do come in different speed ratings though, and those still depend on the condition of your house wiring. Buy them from somewhere with a good return policy and give em a shot. Moca is another option if you have coax wiring for cable TV in your house. That's nice cuz it doesn't share bandwidth with power lines.
vvanders 3y ago
Hams hate them since they induce RFI, I'm honestly surprised they are allowed given they basically turn the unshielded wire in your walls into antennas.
- graphe 3y ago
  Will ham licensing die? The average age is like 60-70 usually, the government kept lowering the requirements to get a license and it's even less popular. I heard they're usually mostly benchmarking distance and truckers listening. Besides apocalypse or maybe wanting to tunnel data through it (illegal) it doesn't seem to serve a real function or benefit. Family radio and the public channels I heard are full of useless chatter and insults, I can't imagine radio being any better than the internet besides the idea of broadcasting data on it which the government doesn't like. Because it runs on tattletales that tell the government, if they removed the licensing we'd just get the ability to not illegally (maybe dirty) encrypted long distance messages anonymously. A far superior system than today's.
  - bityard 3y ago
    I do quite enjoy when non-hams hop on the Internet to try and criticize ham radio. > The average age is like 60-70 usually I can't find any statistics on the average age among all amateur radio license holders. Wikipedia says the average age is 68, but that is marked with a [citation needed] because it doesn't point to a source. Whoever wrote that likely got it from the ARRL which declared that the average age of their membership is 68. Not all hams, and perhaps not even the majority of hams, are members of ARRL. In the same way that not all licensed gun owners are members of the NRA. In rural areas, you may find the local ham radio club is a clique of 5 or 6 older guys who have known each other for several decades and aren't too welcoming to newcomers. But more urban areas are a completely different story. Where I live, the local university has a ham club operated by college students. There is a community club that certainly _trends_ toward older engineer retirees, but actually has members of all ages, ethnicities, and technical background. And they are all a pretty friendly bunch. There are online clubs and communities for various demographics as well. (And an uncountable number of discords for some reason.) > the government kept lowering the requirements to get a license and it's even less popular. The only ones saying that are YouTubers and clickbait SEO-encumbered blogspam. There are more amateur radio license holders now than there have ever been. http://ah0a.org/FCC/Graphs.html http://ah0a.org/FCC/Graphs.html > I heard they're usually mostly benchmarking distance and truckers listening. You must have heard wrong? I don't know what "benchmarking distance" means, and while there _are_ truckers that are hams and sometimes talk while they drive, IME there are not many. Certainly not enough to be a notable chunk of local ham radio activity. > Besides apocalypse or maybe wanting to tunnel data through it (illegal) it doesn't seem to serve a real function or benefit. You could ask the FCC, the ones who license and regulate the service? https://www.fcc.gov/wireless/bureau-divisions/mobility-division/amateur-radio-service https://www.fcc.gov/wireless/bureau-divisions/mobility-divis... "The amateur radio ... services are for qualified persons of any age who are interested in radio technique solely with a personal aim and without pecuniary interest. These services present an opportunity for self-training, intercommunication, and technical investigations." In short, amateur radio is set of spectrum set aside for hobbyists to practice and experiment with radio. Amateur radio can be and has been used to coordinate communication in areas stricken by disaster when other services were down, but it is NOT an "emergency radio" service, no matter what the preppers say. Encryption on the ham bands is forbidden for a very good reason: ham radio activities are public, open, and are not a substitute for commercial or ISM bands. You don't need encryption in order to experiment with radio. It's a different layer, completely orthogonal. The only narrow acceptable use related to cryptography is authorization of control messages to repeaters, RC aircraft, and such. In that case, you are not obscuring the meaning of the message, you are simply proving that you are the rightful controller of the device. > Family radio and the public channels I heard are full of useless chatter and insults, FRS and CB radio are not ham radio, full stop. I have never seen a single community anywhere in real life or on the Internet that didn't have the occasional asshat or two. Although a few hams can be idiots, as in any community, the majority are quite respectful and friendly. > I can't imagine radio being any better than the internet besides the idea of broadcasting data on it which the government doesn't like. As mentioned before, you're missing the purpose and spirit of amateur radio. It's not "free and libre wireless communication for the masses." The spectrum was originally set aside by the FCC at a time when amateurs were making more progress on the state of the art of radio technology on their kitchen tables than radio manufacturers with whole labs. Not as relevant today perhaps, but it's a miracle that we still have that spectrum available to us when these frequencies are so highly coveted by HFTs, ISPs, and mobile phone operators. Broadcasting on amateur radio is not allowed, because there are already FCC-licensed services for broadcasting over radio. Some people think that broadcasting over amateur radio should be allowed because they don't like the FCC's policies on the broadcast bands but that's some pretty backwards thinking, if you ask me. Nobody stumps for broadcast rights on FRS, GRMS, CB, or marine bands for some reason. It's only the amateur radio service where this is ever even suggested as a possibility, generally by people who don't understand what the service is for.
kbouck 3y ago
My experience with PowerLine (TPLink) was really awful. Completely unstable and inconsistent performance. We then switched to MoCA (ActionTec) and it has been about as good as a direct ethernet cable. Consistent performance and stays up for years at a time. No issues ever. The performance of each likely comes down to how much noice is on the respective wires. Our electrical network is likely crowded and influenced somewhat by neighbors. However our coax was completely unused and I disconnected it from the outside world (for privacy and noise reduction) If you have coax outlets in locations useful for networking, I would definitely consider using MoCA instead of PowerLine.
bdavbdav 3y ago
I think I’m one of the few that have had great luck with it. We’ve got an outbuilding which is on a separate circuit than the ring main in the house which has the other end. It still gets a solid 120mbps and no meaningful packet loss, dropouts etc.

cj 3y ago

> My personal wishlist would be for a USB-C power adapter that also provided an ethernet connection, so you could just plug a laptop in anywhere in the house no matter how congested or flaky the WiFi was there. This caught my eye. If something like that worked well without too much fuss setting it up, it would be really cool.

woleium 3y ago
it would, but it would also make networking a thing that electricians had to do, so is unlikely to happen anytime soon
- solardev 3y ago
  Why would electricians have to do it? It wouldn't change the in wall circuits, just combine a powerline networking thing into the data parts of the USB c charger.
myself248 3y ago
Yeeeeears ago, I chopped up an early PoE splitter and grafted it into the already-super-hacked-up Toughbook I was carrying. It let me charge from PoE jacks at the same time as getting network. Immediately thereafter, I realized most of the places I went didn't have PoE PSE, but the concept was neat, anyway.
wongarsu 3y ago
If you did this the straightforward way, basically combining a USB power brick with an USB C GBit Ethernet adapter and a powerline adapter into one compact housing, that would be one heavy chunky $200-$300 brick. And now you don't have to worry about the flakiness of WiFi, but instead have to worry about the speed of your powerline (which can vary greatly throughout a building depending on how the wires are run). You are probably better off strategically placing wifi range extenders connected via powerline.

woleium 3y ago

likely because the bom for putting wifi on a board is $0.02 and the bom for powerline networking is probably around $8, also (not that it matters in this application, but) wifi is probably faster if its reliability in a dense (apartment complex) wifi area you are after, zigbee mesh has more resilience and is cheaper than powerline powerline networks only generally work on the same ring main.

graphe 3y ago
Wifi onboard is .02$? What chipset is that cheap?
mitthrowaway2 3y ago
$0.02 for Wifi? Using what?
RockRobotRock 3y ago
I'm no expert but is there anything cheaper than the ESP32/8266? Big manufacturers could probably get those for a dollar or two?
ta988 3y ago
eps8266 is sub $1 if you buy enough never heard of a $0.02 module.

gorgoiler 3y ago

How much risk is there, with Powerline, that my neighbours will be able to see traffic on my home network? I’ve had powerline adapters work quite happily sometimes (and unhappily other times) on separate circuits in my home so it clearly can tolerate some level of copper juncture (circuit breakers, consumer units, and the like) beyond a simple ring main. A recent unit I bought had an optional pairing process between adapters. I don’t know how it works but it is billed as a way of ensuring privacy between endpoints. It wasn’t clear from the documentation if this was to protect me from other people in my house, or from neighbouring properties.

smileybarry 3y ago
I think I saw neighbor devices in our Powerline setup a decade ago, since I had unrecognized computers indexed in my Network folder (and I use a desktop). Turning on the adapter's really basic 40-bit encryption was enough. That pairing process is the use of a key, yes. I think modern Powerline adapters generate a key anyway.
gandalfian 3y ago
Trouble shooting a relatives apartment I found the internet through his power line adapter was slow because it was connecting to an apartment four floors below... Who actually had a smarter internet connection but sadly at that distance the speed was reduced. I turned on the encryption pairings and that kept it in his own flat. He did have his own electricity meter but clearly all the flats were connected. I imagine in detatched houses less of a problem. In a large building there were literally 100+ WiFi networks visible so power line was a necessary solution rather than blasting through WiFi.
- connicpu 3y ago
  An apartment building probably saves on cost by using one transformer for the whole building, meanwhile detached houses usually each have their own transformer to step down from the local distribution lines. I'd imagine the signals have a hard time getting through a transformer.

DannyBee 3y ago

Power line interacts badly with AFCI and other things because they essentially introduce electrical noise. That is one reason they are becoming less and less common.

InvisibleUp 3y ago

There is - it’s called the X10 Home Automation system. It’s archaic technology from the 1970s and it doesn’t do power monitoring, but you sure can turn devices on and off. EDIT: it seems the KNX standard is a more modern system that supports Powerline as well as other communication methods, although it seems to mostly be for business use.

PaulHoule 3y ago
Both the X10 and powerline are large and expensive devices because they require a big transformer to interface with the power line, any device like that is going to be more expensive than a ZigBee device.

H8crilA 3y ago

Zigbee with its meshing is extremely reliable in pretty much all home setups I could think of. It works quite a lot better than Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Therefore I am not sure it is actually needed to have a separate physical protocol which can only be accessed by smart sockets (and maybe also smart bulbs, though I'd think you need to have all of those on the same power phase first). It would work better in, I don't know, warehouses? Where the distance to the next device becomes too large.

hlandau 3y ago

This post touches on a fairly common experience for me, which is assuming a kind of product must exist and then being surprised to find a complete gap in the market. It seems quite common for a particular market to have come to "conceptualise" itself, or categorise itself, in a certain way that then becomes a prevailing set of assumptions of every company serving that market. This results in every product in a given market basically being the same and formed under the same set of assumptions, leading to a lack of meaningful choice. Examples I've encountered: - You can't get non-wireless (/non-battery-powered) noise cancelling headphones. Go on, try and find some. - The market for presentation remote controls (that is, wireless clickers for advancing to the next slide) seems to be entirely conceptualised around proprietary 2.4GHz communication with one of those tiny USB dongles. The market for Bluetooth presentation remote controls seems to be tiny, and the ones that do support Bluetooth are hybrids which support both Bluetooth and a dongle. Also weirdly expensive. - You can get Zigbee temperature/humidity sensors but getting Zigbee temperature/humidity/pressure sensors is seemingly much more niche, despite the existence of MEMS chips which can sense all of those. Zigbee temperature, humidity, pressure and CO2? Good luck. Given how neat and useful Zigbee is as a technology I'm a bit surprised more isn't done with it and a more varied set of devices aren't available for it.

Bjartr 3y ago
Not to counter your point, but because your said to try to find some, searching 'wired noise cancelling headphones'in Google immediately found options[1], although it was annoying to find the actually wired ones in the results, that do seem to exist. [1] e.g. https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sony-noise-canceling-wired-on-ear-headphones-black/8636734.p?skuId=8636734 https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sony-noise-canceling-wired-on-e...
- calamari4065 3y ago
  The wired earbuds that shipped with my Samsung phone are noise canceling as well
- hlandau 3y ago
  Those are battery powered, though. (And judging by the reviews not very good, and suspiciously cheap, so not really the same quality of product.) I spent a LONG time looking for wired noise-cancelling headphones a year or two ago without success. By this I mean headphones where the noise-cancelling electronics can be powered over USB. It seemed obvious to me to design a pair of headphones with a USB audio interface which powered noise cancelling. But nope, doesn't exist. Even worse all the wireless noise cancelling headphones I find, including high end ones, automatically turn off when you charge them. So you can't actually use them when they're charging. I'm certain companies do this due to some kind of liability paranoia about a battery igniting when someone's wearing them, but the result is that the entire product class seems to be literally designed to put an upper bound on how much you can use the product. I find this insane.

bityard 3y ago

Please don't use powerline network adapters unless you have absolutely no other reasonable choice. One house can pollute huge swaths of the RF spectrum for a whole neighborhood or beyond.

orev 3y ago
Agreed, but it would be helpful to mention the alternative: MoCa. It’s far more reliable, doesn’t have the interference problems, and works in most of the same scenarios where people are looking at powerline (e.g. home networks).
- deleted 3y ago
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superkuh 3y ago

Good. No high speed data communications should be done through power wiring. Specifically, none of these devices should ever be approved for sale within the USA by the FCC. They emit far too much radio interference, and lots of it down in the HF bands where it propagates around the entire world. Building power wiring is never impedance controlled. It is just two parallel wires as a transmission line. Any time this unshielded line gets next to a piece of metal, or it bends too sharp, or whatever, the impedance changes in the RF frequencies significantly enough that it will radiate (and accept incoming interference by reciprocity). These devices literally fill the airwaves with interference. So why does the FCC allow them? Because for FCC testing they're allowed to use contrived setups/jigs of power wiring that are nothing like those that happen in actual buildings. FCC approval of these thing should require actual testing in actual house/building like wiring. If they did none would ever be approved and all existing ones would be taken off the market. So... yes, you can technically legally use PowerLine networking. But if you do so knowingly you're being extremely rude and a bad person. Like, throwing trash on the ground in a national park type rude. The radio spectrum is a limited shared resource. Please don't ruin it.

Dalewyn 3y ago
>No high speed data communications should be done through power wiring. It bears considering that "compromise" technologies like powerline ethernet aren't because we should, it's because we can. There's nothing technically appealing about powerline ethernet, it's always going to be inferior to simple ethernet cabling and at best a sidegrade to wireless ethernet or repurposing coax cabling or telephone wiring. Its practical appeal is the convenience of not having to run new ethernet cabling in an environment where wireless ethernet or reusing other kinds of existing wiring also aren't an option. Running new ethernet cabling can be an arduous task, especially if you want to do it nicely, and sometimes practical convenience trumps objective superiority.
- superkuh 3y ago
  Most people I know that use powerline networking do so because they have aesthetic objections to running a little cable along the baseboards in their apartment/house. Arduous? Only if you are pulling it through the walls because of aesthetic objections to just running the cable along the wall. This "can" in this case is assuming a premise that the aesthetic appearance of your living space is more important than not littering and degrading a shared public resource. It's not. That's rude.

paradox460 3y ago

There are. They're called X10

analog31 3y ago

Not an engineer: I wonder if the ubiquitous line filters on a typical home power "network" is enough to quash a powerline data signal. I'm thinking of those knobs that are molded around power cords, and perhaps some built into appliances themselves. Anecdote: I participated in college radio, and learned that the station originated with a couple of students in a fraternity broadcasting AM radio on the power lines, in the 1950s. Two of those students became my professors. They said that in those days, the power system was so simple, that they could reach the entire town. But more modern power distribution equipment had built-in filtering that eventually forced the station to go on-air.