Internet over power lines?

Rushie

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Rushie
Is anyone using this and if so what gadget do you have? We used it in the old house with a Trendnet thingie but now I can't find but one of them, so naturally, if I order a whole new system, the lost one will show up.

We just need it for one room where it's problematic to run a cat 5 cable and we don't want to use WiFi.
 
Why don’t you just want to use WiFi?
 
If it’s security reasons, you’ll have the same problem with using power lines.
 
Why don’t you just want to use WiFi?

Good question. I'm not sure I don't. I seem to remember way back in the past trying to get this particular machine to work with a Wifi adapter and having a problem. I've got a Wifi adapter card in the closet. I'd have to install it in the case but they make USB ones now, right? Maybe I should do that instead.

PS Edit: I remember! It wasn't that machine it was another and it was a USB doohickey (but I've no idea where it is now) it did work but it was too slow for my contract job. So I tried the power line thing for that too and it also was too slow or something, so I ended up running a dang cat 5 cable across the hall and down the staircase and over the doorframe so I could work. It was just for three months until we moved, not worth installing a jack.

But that was a while back, maybe they've gotten better with these things.
 
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Yeah you can do WiFi over usb
 
Well dang! I had not one but TWO Belkin Dual-Band WiFi USB adapters in my closet, unused, in the box, and fairly new.

The machine is connected up, ready to go.

I can't believe I wasted two days looking for that other stupid Trendnet thing.
 
I've got three "TP-Link" brand powerline adaptors. They've worked flawlessly for the ~6 months I've had them.

There was a couple of points in the house with bad Wifi strength, and some devices that didn't seem too friendly with the wifi adaptors I was using. Bandwidth was definitely low. That all cleared up with the TP-Link adaptors. Especially noticeable when streaming a movie from a remote box.

The models I buy (AV1200) include three Internet jacks, so they can serve multiple items without a separate router.

Ron Wanttaja
 
I've got three "TP-Link" brand powerline adaptors. They've worked flawlessly for the ~6 months I've had them.

There was a couple of points in the house with bad Wifi strength, and some devices that didn't seem too friendly with the wifi adaptors I was using. Bandwidth was definitely low. That all cleared up with the TP-Link adaptors. Especially noticeable when streaming a movie from a remote box.

The models I buy (AV1200) include three Internet jacks, so they can serve multiple items without a separate router.

Ron Wanttaja

Thanks I will keep this in mind if he streams video or something and finds it too slow.
 
you could go moca.. if there's coax in there

No there's nothing in there. The room is on the part of the house very difficult to access although not impossible. When our house flooded this summer and the walls were all torn out I wanted to bring a cat 5 jack back there but hubby nixed it. He didn't want to do it and the contractor might have charged a lot for what he'd have to do to get it there but IMO that's what we should have done. Oh well.
 
I've got a couple of CISCO ethernet over power line things. They worked well enough at the time, but I just put in real cat 5 wiring and six ubiquity APs and use wifi now.
 
Power line Ethernet is flaky. Performance ranges from not at all to excellent depending mainly on the house wiring (and, of course, the quality of the equipment).

I've had power line Ethernet work not at all in one outlet in a room, but splendidly in another outlet on the same circuit. Sometimes I could diagnose and correct the problem (usually reversed polarity, or a bad ground at the problem outlet with the newer devices); but other times everything checked out fine. It just didn't work.

MoCA tends to be a bit less flaky and more reliable if there's coax available, but it doesn't get along well with satellite and some cable systems. It also gets unreliable if someone daisy-chained a bunch of splitters into the cable lines. But all in all, it's a bit less flaky than power line. If coax is available, I've found that it's usually the more reliable choice.

Personally, I just run Ethernet if it's an option.

Rich
 
One thing on the power-line Ethernet: The units cannot be plugged into power strips with surge protection, and it's harder and harder to find power strips without it.

The units I bought include a power outlet as well as the Ethernet jacks, so you can plug them directly into the wall and then the outlet strip into them.

Ron Wanttaja
 
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Power line Ethernet is flaky. Performance ranges from not at all to excellent depending mainly on the house wiring (and, of course, the quality of the equipment).

I've had power line Ethernet work not at all in one outlet in a room, but splendidly in another outlet on the same circuit. Sometimes I could diagnose and correct the problem (usually reversed polarity, or a bad ground at the problem outlet with the newer devices); but other times everything checked out fine. It just didn't work.

MoCA tends to be a bit less flaky and more reliable if there's coax available, but it doesn't get along well with satellite and some cable systems. It also gets unreliable if someone daisy-chained a bunch of splitters into the cable lines. But all in all, it's a bit less flaky than power line. If coax is available, I've found that it's usually the more reliable choice.

Personally, I just run Ethernet if it's an option.

Rich
It won’t cross phases, so, if one side of the house is on one phase and the on another, it just won’t work.
 
We have run POE power over ethernet to access points in distant locations poorly served by existing devices with good results.
 
You are going to really annoy any short wave listeners in the area with PLT devices. They notch the ham bands, but everywhere else they scream. I ran tests on old HomePlug 1.0 devices a number of years ago with the following results:

The HomePlug 1.0 devices use the HF spectrum from 7 MHz to 22 MHz. Ham bands in that range notched.

I tested the signals from these devices in the EMC lab where I worked at the time. In the ham bands the signals were about CISPR 22 Class B, the same as the limits for your PC. Outside the ham bands the emissions were 25 to 30 dB over the Class B limits.

OK, what does this mean in the real world outside the lab? I took the devices home. Hooked one up in my office/ham shack and the other somewhere else in the house. My HF station runs a random length end fed wire antenna with the feed point about 10 feet from the corner of the office/ham shack. If anyone was going to suffer interference, it would be me. In the ham bands I couldn't tell it was operating, telling me that the CISPR 22 limits were fine. Outside the ham bands there was no question it was operating. It obliterated everything. Forget listening to anything between 7 MHz and 22 MHz outside the ham bands.

Best of luck running data over power lines. Oh, and it mattered that the two devices were on the same leg of the incoming power line. If they were on opposite legs you had no communications between them.
 
It won’t cross phases, so, if one side of the house is on one phase and the on another, it just won’t work.

Doubtful you have phases in your home. Two 110 legs, likely. It will indeed have trouble across legs since the signal has to go back to the transformer to do so unless you had a frequency appropriate bridge installed at the panel.
 
Doubtful you have phases in your home. Two 110 legs, likely.
I thought about nitpicking that, but I eventually concluded that zero degrees and 180 degrees are phases just as much as zero, 120, and 240 degrees are.
 
Doubtful you have phases in your home. Two 110 legs, likely. It will indeed have trouble across legs since the signal has to go back to the transformer to do so unless you had a frequency appropriate bridge installed at the panel.
Perhaps split phase is the correct terminology. Correct, it won’t cross the transformer.
 
Eh? The powerline boxes I have (Linksys/Cisco) work just fine on surge protectors. What they won't work is plugged into UPSs.
The statement about the two legs is true, same as for X.10.
 
Eh? The powerline boxes I have (Linksys/Cisco) work just fine on surge protectors. What they won't work is plugged into UPSs.
The statement about the two legs is true, same as for X.10.

X10 sold a nice device that you could plug into a dryer outlet so the signals could easily cross legs. I don't know what frequency the powerline e-net adapters generally use but if the X10 device were just a high pass filter it might also work for the these adapters.
 
Yep, had two different ones of those.

Anyway, anybody want the linksys POE boxes I have? I have finally gotten the CAT5 wiring cleaned up in my house and I now have six ubiquiti access points (including two outside ones) hooked up, so I'm done with those kludges. I have two different incarnations of them (they don't interoperate with each other).
 
X10 sold a nice device that you could plug into a dryer outlet so the signals could easily cross legs. I don't know what frequency the powerline e-net adapters generally use but if the X10 device were just a high pass filter it might also work for the these adapters.
IME, X10 sucked even when it was on the same leg. But YMMV.
 
Mine always worked well. It's been replaced by a Samsung Smart Hub and several Z-Wave devices.
I had an X10-based pool controller in San Antonio that never worked right. And a system in a house at one point. Never worked reliably.

Glad yours worked well.

I worked on carrier-current systems for a while... it became obvious why X10 would be a problem...
 
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