Powerline networking

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Jun 30, 2022
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Powerline networking is a good solution for me inside the house. Faster than current Wifi for a lot of purposes and useful when I drag in machines from the home lab that don't have Wifi.

I'm upgrading from 200Mb/s (with 100Mb/s LAN ports) to 1Gb/s (with 1Gb/s LAN port). Bought six second user BT Mini Connecter v2s. But I did look at other options.

I note that there are Devolo 2.4Gb/s products with three 1Gb/s LAN ports. Which made me wonder about channel bonding. I'd be surprised if the switch element of them supports 802.1AX.
 

BoredSysadmin

Not affiliated with Maxell
Mar 2, 2019
1,050
437
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I never had good luck with Powerline solutions, but YMMV. Let us know how well gig powerline works for you (or not)
 

MBastian

Active Member
Jul 17, 2016
205
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Düsseldorf, Germany
I am running a TL-WPA8630 (with Openwrt) pair to extend WLAN Coverage to the kitchen and I've never beeen able to get more than 150 MBit/s out of it, even in a testing environment on the same breaker.
Mind that the advertised 2.4Gb/s is purely theoretical and also the accumulated value. You have 1.2Gb/s up- and 1.2Gb/s downstream.
I'd say you'd be lucky to break the 250MBit/s mark.
 

cesmith9999

Well-Known Member
Mar 26, 2013
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These are my findings as well. Never full throughput. Enough to get a connection to the other end of the house without running Cat6 across the floor.

Current Wi-fi Mesh with the new bands will do better in most cases.

Chris
 

Stephan

Well-Known Member
Apr 21, 2017
920
698
93
Germany
Powerline will drown out any shortwave reception in the near vicinity because it is 0-30 MHz. So any DXer will hate you. If closeby it will also interfere with DSL, up to loss of sync of your DSL. Wifi repeater using a cheap directional antenna on both ends is imho the way to go.
 
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Jun 30, 2022
113
24
18
I am running a TL-WPA8630 (with Openwrt) pair to extend WLAN Coverage to the kitchen and I've never beeen able to get more than 150 MBit/s out of it, even in a testing environment on the same breaker.
Mind that the advertised 2.4Gb/s is purely theoretical and also the accumulated value. You have 1.2Gb/s up- and 1.2Gb/s downstream.
I'd say you'd be lucky to break the 250MBit/s mark.
I should probably do some benchmarking of my existing Devolo kit before I replace it.

I understand powerline networking a little better now. It has more in common with Wifi than it does with Ethernet. Not just in terms of frequency-division multiplexing (FDM) but also how sensitive to how evironment is built.
 
Jun 30, 2022
113
24
18
Powerline will drown out any shortwave reception in the near vicinity because it is 0-30 MHz. So any DXer will hate you. If closeby it will also interfere with DSL, up to loss of sync of your DSL. Wifi repeater using a cheap directional antenna on both ends is imho the way to go.
I thought better kit avoided some frequency ranges?
 

Stephan

Well-Known Member
Apr 21, 2017
920
698
93
Germany
Keyword being "some"... and then firmware used to only lower spectral power in certain ranges, not skip them entirely.
 

Mithril

Active Member
Sep 13, 2019
354
106
43
Besides powerline, look into MOCA which can use (most likely existing) coax you'd be using for cable TV. I'd be ebay has a ton of used/refurbed moca adaptors.
 

Helzy

Active Member
Oct 19, 2017
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Besides powerline, look into MOCA which can use (most likely existing) coax you'd be using for cable TV. I'd be ebay has a ton of used/refurbed moca adaptors.
Definitely tons out there. Which seem to be the best adapters to go after?
 

Mithril

Active Member
Sep 13, 2019
354
106
43
It's been a while since I used any (back in the early days of Verizon Fios when the techs didn't know or were not allowed to run ethernet from the optical terminal).

If I had to guess Motorola would be a good choice as they also make cable modems