3 ms·

OP was a bit oddly worded but I think nawitus meant that he or she would be happy with 100Mbps wireless if it were as reliable as a wired connection, so basical

OP was a bit oddly worded but I think nawitus meant that he or she would be happy with 100Mbps wireless if it were as reliable as a wired connection, so basically exactly what you're saying. I personally ended up using power-line ethernet to replace a lot of the wireless throughout my apartment. While the wireless connection was much faster in theory (and in practice when everything was perfect) than the powerline ethernet speeds, trying to stream HD movies and such was always an exercise in frustration with the wifi no matter how good the routers and/or repeaters were on the wifi connection and how well they were set up. With the powerline ethernet adapters, OTOH, I just plugged them in and everything Just Worked, much slower peak speed, but nice and consistent and more than enough bandwidth for HD movie streaming. In any case the horrible state of US ISPs is the bottleneck for networking at home for me right now regardless of how I wire myself internally. My two options are Time Warner Cable (which cuts out between the modem and their headend for minutes multiple times a day and was never fixed despite half a dozen on-site technician visits) or AT&T DSL which has been much more reliable but is annoyingly slow for big downloads and such. I'm currently using the AT&T connection, but both options are terrible in their own way and nothing else usable is available to me. Fuck you, US ISPs.

tanzam75 13y ago
> I personally ended up using power-line ethernet to replace a lot of the wireless throughout my apartment. ... With the powerline ethernet adapters, OTOH, I just plugged them in and everything Just Worked, much slower peak speed, but nice and consistent and more than enough bandwidth for HD movie streaming. Powerline networking is still a shared medium. You're sharing the available bandwidth with all of the neighboring houses on the same utility transformer. It does have the benefit that signal strength drops off with linear wiring distance. Thus, you're farther from your neighbors than you would be with Wi-Fi. However, as with 5 GHz, you're getting good results right now because powerline networking isn't too popular. But if every house were to get powerline networking, then you would start encountering interfering networks.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Circuit breakers have pretty dramatic attenuation. You go through at least two to get from your power sockets to your neighbor's.
  - tanzam75 13y ago
    > Circuit breakers have pretty dramatic attenuation. You go through at least two to get from your power sockets to your neighbor's. Yes, but not enough attenuation to block powerline communications. This is not a theoretical concern. People have tested HomePlug units and successfully connected to neighboring houses. There's even explicit provision in the spec for neighboring networks, so that they share the bandwidth instead of stomping all over each other.

tanzam75 13y ago

> I personally ended up using power-line ethernet to replace a lot of the wireless throughout my apartment. ... With the powerline ethernet adapters, OTOH, I just plugged them in and everything Just Worked, much slower peak speed, but nice and consistent and more than enough bandwidth for HD movie streaming. Powerline networking is still a shared medium. You're sharing the available bandwidth with all of the neighboring houses on the same utility transformer. It does have the benefit that signal strength drops off with linear wiring distance. Thus, you're farther from your neighbors than you would be with Wi-Fi. However, as with 5 GHz, you're getting good results right now because powerline networking isn't too popular. But if every house were to get powerline networking, then you would start encountering interfering networks.

sliverstorm 13y ago
Circuit breakers have pretty dramatic attenuation. You go through at least two to get from your power sockets to your neighbor's.
- tanzam75 13y ago
  > Circuit breakers have pretty dramatic attenuation. You go through at least two to get from your power sockets to your neighbor's. Yes, but not enough attenuation to block powerline communications. This is not a theoretical concern. People have tested HomePlug units and successfully connected to neighboring houses. There's even explicit provision in the spec for neighboring networks, so that they share the bandwidth instead of stomping all over each other.