Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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 not an electrician either but that's most defiantly not the standard practice in any application that I've ever seen. Most of your heavy draw devices are going to be 240V and will hit both legs by default -- the other circuits are usually divided as equally as possible between the two legs. Open up your circuit box sometime -- you'll see how it's arranged internally.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
I don't even worry about encryption. WiFi range isn't 10 acres with the standard antennas
Fixed that for you. You might want to rethink your policy about not encrypting your connection because you are out in the middle of nowhere.
I used to work for a WISP. One day I was out in the field doing tests with a 24db directional antenna. My laptop automatically associated to my home network before I could direct it to connect to the network I was trying to troubleshoot. My house was a little over a mile away and the AP at home had the standard issue dipole antennas on it. Had enough signal strength to surf the web at full speed and transfer files off my server.
Moral of the story: Don't underestimate what someone can do with a high gain antenna. Encrypt your network or don't come crying to us when the Feds kick down your door after someone uses your network to download kiddie porn, pirate software or threaten to kill the President.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
Just a mile? You should see what us private pilots can pick up from 10,000 feet =) (yes, yes, I'm aware that's right around 1.5 miles)
I think I'd just scotch-tape cat5 to the walls before trying to use the electrical wiring.
Wont work. Any line conditioning will kill all communications.
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
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..)
Can't we wait till the interference issues with radio communication are sorted out? See The ARRL site on this issue.
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 ;-)