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5 Powerline Networking Devices Reviewed
An anonymous reader writes "Most people who can't or won't hardwire for broadband have an obvious alternative: Wi-Fi. Unfortunately, there can be architectural anomalies between floors or even between rooms that can interfere with Wi-Fi signals, resulting in spotty, or even dead, signals. So what do you do? Well, you can try using a powerline device. Computerworld reviewer Bill O'Brien tests powerline units from Belkin, D-Link, Linksys, Netgear and Zyxel, and compares their performance to that of his wired and wireless setups."
They used to be kind of squirrely, and WiFi was just so much better. But with the explosion of interference, it might be time to look again.
What about packet loss, ping, ping jitter and resistance to interference?
Bulk transfer is useful, but may not be important to gamers or people who want responsive.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
I suppose if all else failed, you could do this. I however, would look into wireless just a little bit harder. There are all types of antennae mods you can get for range extending, and not to mention wireless repeaters. The problem is your average joe 6pack consumer wants results and wants them now. For your average slash dotter like myself, we're more prone to get the wireless running and tweaking every aspect of the router from angle, transmit power, etc. to milk every last bit of performance.
Once upon a time in a mythical land called Soviet Russia, a hot bowl of grits had Natalie Portman.
A little slow; but at least they are flaky and expensive, so I give them a thumbs up.
Flipped through the article, but what I'd like to know is if they've improved heat dissipation on these things. I tried a few different makes years ago (back when the best you could hope for out of them was ~10Mbps), but after about a month they'd cook themselves to death unless you modded them with vents and fans.
Which, I if remember my breaker right, the breaker divides the two lines into two buses. You deliver 240v to your stuff by taking up two slots on one buss. Then again, I think you put your heavy draw devices on one buss and the room outlets on the other, meaning it would prolly work. Then again, I'm not an electrician. I'm sure someone here will point out the correct wiring practice.
import system.cool.Sig;
I used to have massive interference when I lived in town.
I bought 10 acres out in the country, but can still get 7Mb DSL (telecommute). And the lot is backed-up to a nature preserve and a tree farm on the other side.
I don't even worry about encryption. WiFi range isn't 10 acres. Zero interference.
What kind of small office wouldn't be able to run a piece of CAT5? If you can't afford to do that (and I'm including the done by hand up through the ceiling by the CEO method) then your company has bigger problems.
$20 of CAT5, $10 of jacks, and a $20 fish-tape isn't fiscally feasible, but these gizmos are?
These real world speeds are pretty bad. The D-Link didn't even finish the test. It looks like they came out at about 2.4 MBps. His WiFi was 4x faster. Ethernet was 10x faster.
Oh, yeah, that's a common test. Why is it you can't let the Ethernet cable hang through the hall again?
Wanna bet? I've seen new houses where it was dumb luck (and incredible fault tolerance) that let the phone jacks work. When you try to go from one end of a new house to the other, or across floors, I doubt this will be representative of anything.
So these things can't stream video under real world conditions. Excellent.
Nice to know the top speed, but obviously you'll never run into this case except in the same room. And if both boxes are in the same room... run the Ethernet cable hanging from the ceiling.
If you really want to these kind of gizmos for your little office, how well do they work with 3 computers? How about 5? What happens if your 2.4 MBps goes to 0.3 when you add the 3rd computer? He mentioned that at least one has some kind of security. How good is it? Does it compare with WPA2? What are the chances the next office over is close enough (though the power lines) they could be on my network?
Pull a wire. We fussed with WiFi for years, and it is often problematic. If you are in a house or office, pull the wire. It's no that hard (for the simple cases he is listing, like two rooms above one another). Get the land lord's permission if you don't own the place. It's not worth all the fussing you may end up having to do with WiFi (thanks to neighbor access points, cheap $30 APs, etc).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
if your power goes out, that your Internet connection goes with it?
Wait, no, even if the power goes out, you'd still lose your Internet connection.
Well, not precisely. Think about it. What if all your equipment is hooked up to a UPS? Then, as long as your cable, telephone, or whatnot, stays up, you'd stay up.
Good point. Good point.
I guess it's time to stop arguing with myself.
Some people might think these are attractive because the signal can't be intercepted as easily as wifi. However Powerlinecommunications hacking seems to be moving on nicely http://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/Fahrplan/events/2901.en.html . My understanding is that it's sometimes possible to pick up signal leaking from other users in the building.
I think I'd just scotch-tape cat5 to the walls before trying to use the electrical wiring.
I have two 85mbps models to stream video from the computer downstairs to a MediaMVP in the back bedroom upstairs. It works with the dishwasher running and never drops the video (SD only). One unit is plugged into an outlet by the panel in the basement, the other upstairs. I'm very happy. I've looked at stringing wire but it wouldn't be easy.
I bought a set of 3 of these for my parent's house and they worked really well for what we needed them to do - namely, to hook up the TiVos to the home network (these were the newer TiVos that only support the TiVo branded WiFi adapter, unfortunately). As I don't live in their town and was only there for the weekend to help, this was the quickest thing Fry's could arrange.
It worked so well, that when I got home I was inspired to feed a phone line to our tv satellite receiver over a powerline box. That way, all 4 pair in the one cat5 run going to that spot could be used for Gigabit and the phone could go elsewhere. So I bought a set of the RCA phone line over power gizmos. The resulting phone line was so shitty-noisy that I wouldn't want to make a phone call over it myself, much less ask the DirecTV receiver to attempt it.
I wound up buying a set of RTX DualJacks to solve the problem. They use 2.4 GHz to move the phone line and work perfectly, but they're nearly impossible to find anymore. I had to get them used on eBay.
I'm a little annoyed that nobody has made a similar box to transport a phone line over Ethernet. Yes, there are VoIP solutions, but they're way too expensive and over-engineered for what I want. Just two boxes that talk to each other with raw Ethernet frames to move a phone line from here to there oughtn't to be too much to ask, but apparently is.
From personal experience, I have to say the Belkin Powerline AV+ unit is by far the best of the bunch here. Rock solid performance all the way. Look no further!
Sincerely,
Mark Bayard
I tried using Netgear powerline devices to connect my outside security cameras to my router about a year ago. It kinda worked--as long as I didn't expect too much in the way of throughput—like streaming video instead of occasional JPEGs. I also had a couple of computers connected via Wi-Fi at the time, and was so (unreasonably) encouraged by this less than stellar success that I switched them over to powerline "warts" too. They worked pretty well.
Then I moved my router to another room, and I haven't gotten these things to work ever again. Apparently, if your house wiring is just so, the powerline warts are fine; if the wiring—or the wiring between the points you are trying to connect—is not what the warts want, you won't get a signal.
Somebody told me I should try one of those "bridges" that the X-10 people use to connect different parts of their home wiring so their X10 devices work, but messing with these things was giving me a worse chronic eyelid twitch than wireless. Luckily, I discovered that my youngest daughter has all the necessary qualifications for an excellent cable monkey—mainly, she's petite enough to worm her way through tight, dark spaces, and isn't afraid of spiders. So I just tied some CAT5 to her ankle and sent her into the attic. No more problems now, everything's connected. Wire is good.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
O'Reilly Wireless Hacks. Page 164, Hack #68 -- "Homebrew Power over Ethernet".
FLR
I've got four of the DLink DHP-301 units running in my house and they're just terrific.
They're great for anyone unwilling (or unable) to tear up their walls to run CAT5. In my case, I'd have to go through three floors and I'm not exactly a do-it-yourselfer. These units were affordable enough (compared to losing a weekend and having to get help from a friend to run CAT5), and just plain work. I took a risk being an early adopter and I'd do it again if I had the choice.
I use them to connect my broadband connection and servers (in the basement), the media center switch (main floor), wireless AP(upstairs) and a second media center (upstairs).
Some of the advantages of these sort of units : :)
- Zero setup. Unless you want encryption on the line (and they're rare enough that's probably safe without), you just plug them into your outlets and you've got an instant network bridge
- Flexible. I've moved the placement of where I had my bridges plugged in a few times. With wired CAT5 through the house, I'd have to run Ethernet from wherever the drop is to wherever the computer or network printer happens to be.
- Mostly problem free. I've had these for about two years now and the only problem I ever have is having to unplug a unit about once every six months. I can live with that easily.
Someone else had posted comments about the speeds over these lines so I figured I'd offer my experiences.
For doing large file transfers, yes they are a little slow. However, in terms of just about anything else they're completely sufficient.
In my house we regularly have up to three clients playing movies off the file server without issue. (In addition to standard internet browsing and occasionally running bittorrent off a laptop..)
I have a pair of Netgear adapters because my ADSL modem is in my living room and the room I wanted to put my office in was at the other end of the house. Previously, I have drilled holes and run ethernet or bridged my wireless base stations and that worked OK but this time I just couldn't get a connection to hold up and I didn't want to mess with long wires. With network over mains I can now have two separate base stations running giving me much better coverage in the house. File transfers over the mains connection is quicker than my 54G wireless and I stream HD movies from my Mac mini to my Apple TV via the mains, then over wireless to the ATV.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
I had so much WiFi interference in my condo that I was only able to watch Netflix at the lowest quality, plus YouTube videos would buffer all the time. I tried a Netgear XE102 and now I can watch Netflix at full-res, and YouTube works great. It doesn't work on every outlet though.
What kind of units is "minutes per 8 gigabyte"?
I would prefer to have genuine Ethernet strung in there, but I rent the place, and I'd have to cut holes in things to get the cables and outlets in place (I know; I crawled around under the house and looked). So until I get the impetus to actually follow through on that, we're living with these HomePlug AV things.
They're still unreliable. That entire branch of the LAN drops out on occasion -- not even pings get through. And since there's no management interface on the bridges, I can't see what they're complaining about. They just mysteriously work, then stop working, then start working again. Perfect for Windows users :-). And, of course, it's my fault when they stop working.
Somewhat better than WiFi, but a weak substitute for genuine Cat 5.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Can't we wait till the interference issues with radio communication are sorted out? See The ARRL site on this issue.
I've worked with some commercial powerline equipment before from a company called Telkonet (http://www.telkonet.com). In general, this equipment worked great, and was an ideal solution for those scenarios where running CAT-5 was extremely difficult.
One common gotcha with the installations, which is most likely common to all devices of this sort, is the separation of circuits within the building. Specifically, power is delivered in three separate "legs" (phases) that are isolated from each other at the breaker panel. So, you can experience quite a bit of signal loss when trying to connect from an outlet on one phase to an outlet on another. Telkonet's solution to this, which may or may not be unique, is a device that acts as a gateway and attaches to the breaker panel itself, with wires into each of the three phases.
As I said, this worked great in the cases where we needed it. We even went so far as to use it as a backbone for access point connectivity...
The article is about performance of 200mbps powerline vs. 5GHz draft-N, fair enough. In my experience home users just want an easy stable connection for cheap. They inevitably start with wireless-G, which they either can't setup, or get a useless 0-2 bars of signal with. We sell them a 85mbps powerline kit, requires no setup, and they quickly wonder what all this wireless nonsense is about. Lots of happy customers.
I ran wire from my basement to my second floor, then a wire from my second to third floor.
Did the whole thing for $60, $30 of which was a real good crimper/stripper. The other $30 was 200 feet of cable and a box of 25 plugs.
My favorite bit is the long run was made, outside, with plenum cable. You know, the one that goes through ducts, and certainly isn't rated for outside.
It's been two years with no problems, better throughput, and no crapping out like WiFi does in a crowded area.
Just wire it, you can even hack it together like I did, but get it over with.
And they work great. Tivo and PS3 on the TV, media server in the basement, webserver in the guest bedroom, and the bridge to the router in the office. You forget they're there because they are so reliable.
I use Belkin AV powerline devices to connect my MythTV/Squeezebox server to three 11g wireless access points needed to give good coverage. We can watch two simultaneous TV programmes and listen to music using various wireless access points, but not using the same access point. This suggests that in my installation the powerline is much more capable than wireless.
I have never experienced any interference problems.
They also worked well in my in-laws long Cotswold stone house that was very wireless-unfriendly.
Maybe they are more suited to the 230V single-phase ring-main based wiring systems used in the UK than the US system
A
In London's Docklands, at our rented house we could see more than 23 different wifi networks crowded around us. We had to spend some time to find the least congested channel to get any usable signal for even the most basic web browsing. The minute some neighbour came home with a new wifi router and plugged it in, it threw off our carefully balanced setup, and we'd have to run through the channels again.
As it was a rented house, running Cat5 was not an option. We bought Devolo Homeplug AV bricks and I was very impressed by the true plug and play nature of them. Streaming video from the servers upstairs to the Mac Mini under the TV worked perfectly.
I'm very glad to see that products now include multiple ports and even electrical outlet replicators. It was very annoying to have to use a Homeplug brick and then a separate switch in order to serve multiple networked devices.
This is not Broadband Over Power Line(BPL). In BPL a public electricity utility company uses its cables to provide broadband. Since the cables are long (long as in 10s of kms) , and their modems pump in a lot of power, they interfere with HAM communications.
This article, FYI, talks about low power networking devices for short home cables (short as in 10s of meters).
I have 3 Zyxel 200mb powerline adapters for streaming HD content to 2 Popcorn Hours. They work great.
Only fault I've found is one packed up (quickly replaced) and occasionally (twice now) I've had to unplug the server side one to get it responding.
4 years living in a 1729 vicarage in the middle of the UK, rented, Grade 2* listed. One netgear ADSL/wifi box covered the house just fine, bounced its signals 'through' the 2 foot thick solid stone walls to different rooms, and for people who really wanted a cable, we just ran ethernet cable discretely round the edges of the hall, up the stair and into people's rooms. Lift the carpets gently and run the cable underneath and along the skirting boards.
Not sure what listing status your parents' house is, I don't know about what's covered under Grade 1, but I'm pretty sure you are allowed to run cables under the carpet and tack them to the walls, get some sympathetic ducting etc. Grade 2 says exterior only has to be cleared for planning permission. You can drill holes through interior walls without needing clearance as long as you follow common sense and general building regs (which are there to stop you killing yourself, in practice nobody's going to haul you up as long as you aren't incredibly stupid and try to run electricity near water, etc).
If you can't put cable down - and I am guessing this might be to do more with your mum and dad having beautiful interior period decor and not wanting anything post 1850 around the place rather than building regs (they've got electric cables right? so they've cleared permission previously to drill holes) - then get wifi in, maybe use something like dd-wrt or openwrt and link together a couple of boxes to hop around the rooms.
My guess your issue is more to do with it being your parents house and what they will or won't allow than government regulations ;-)
But when I had to do some sheetrock repairs, and add a cable outlet, I learned how easy it was to work with, repair, and finish.
If a guy like me can do it to his house, anyone can.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
Based on his timings, the Netgear device is only five times slower than his gigabit ethernet connection, which, on the surface, doesn't seem so bad. While the Netgear's powerline interface is rated at 200 Mbits/sec, it's ethernet jack is 100Base-T, so its limited to 100 Mbits/sec. Given his 8.05 GB sample data and gigabit ethernet connection,
8,050 Mb / (6.5 * 60) sec == 20.64 Mb/sec or 165 Mbit/sec,
so his NAS can't deliver the data anywhere near gigabit speed.
The Netgear device is delivering data at 4.1 Mb/sec or 33 Mbit/sec, which is only one third of its rated speed of 12.5 Mb/sec or 100 Mbit/sec. Still that's four times faster than my current internet connection (8 Mbits/sec).
For his wireless connection he's using a wireless-N network, which is a lot faster than I realized, but it's also a lot faster than the wireless-G card in my laptop.
I have a wireless LAN based on equipment supplied by Roadrunner. Works OK.
BUT! I have a lot of metal in my house. Between heating ducts and the steel trusses holding up the second floor wifi doesn't work well between floors and doesn't always work room to room.
I have 6 of the AirLink power line Ethernet boxes. I bought them on sale at Fry's for no more than $30 each. I didn't buy them all at once. I bought one pair and then bought another one and then another one over a period of several years
I have one behind my living room couch feeding two laptops and a printer. I have two of them in my bedroom. I have one in the garage. One more next to a server in my office, And, I have one next to the Roadrunner box that feeds the whole network.
As I write this I am copying all my photos from my wife's PC to my PC. The system monitor says I am getting 899 KiB/s (using Ubuntu 9.4 alpha 4). The boxes are only rated for 83 Mbps.
On a laptop in the living room I can usually get better than 50 Mbps over the power line and 1 to 4 Mbps over wireless.
These things are great.
So, why didn't I just run cat 5? Good question. I have a fairly modern air tight home. The walls are filled with injected foam. I have watched techs from both AT&T and Roadrunner go slowly nuts trying to find a void they can pull a wire through. I tried putting up cat 5 along the corners and under the rugs but the result was really really ugly.
And, yes, I have used the 100 foot extension cord I use for my lawn mower to connect a laptop to both power and my network and use it to surf from my back yard.
In the evening I can often see a dozen wifi networks from my living room couch. The interference is fierce. Often my wifi network (sitting upstairs from the couch) is the 3rd or 4th down list of signal strength. That is, I can get a better connection through my neighbors wifi than from my own. Well, I could if they weren't all secured :-).
So, I think Ethernet over powerline beats wifi all to hell for home and small office applications. Low cost, zero set up time, high speed. Usable anywhere there is a wall socket. Can't beat it.
Stonewolf