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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."
A little slow; but at least they are flaky and expensive, so I give them a thumbs up.
How about they try turning on a toaster, microwave, dish washer, space heater or some other high consumption device as well? I played around with these back in the day and somebody turning on a toaster in the different room on a completely different circuit was enough to murder my connection.
There are still a few hitches. Here in the U.S., we tend to run split-phase wiring. The electrical service enters our homes as 240 volts made up of two 120V lines (or legs). Our 120V outlets are derived from tapping off one or the other of those 120V legs. As a result, you may not be able to network devices that are plugged into outlets on different legs.
Good catch on the different legs of split phase. Always wondered about that. Guess they can't use the ground wiring for some reason?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I have a Linksys PLK200 set connecting my living room to my basement router and over that I:
Stream HD movies from Netflix
Stream tons of other content from my media server
Play online games over Xbox Live
Surf the internets
All without a problem. But then again I also use a wireless mouse and an LCD monitor to play first person shooters...
I've also noticed no problems due to microwaves or the dishwasher.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
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.
>What about packet loss, ping, ping jitter and resistance to interference?
Heck, how about reporting in standard units? Time it takes to transfer his porn collection in a zip archive, i mean 8.05gigs of data? What the heck is that? How about just running iperf and reporting standard mbps.
Since the "ground", the third wire, the bare or green wire, properly known as the "grounding" conductor, is, at radio frequencies, somewhat separated from the "neutral", the white wire, properly known in a 120 Volt circuit as the "grounded" wire (it and the "grounding" wire are tied together at the meter base only)(it's only the "neutral" in a 240 volt circuit where you have 2 "hot" wires 240 volts apart and each 120 volts away from the neutral), you should be able to insert a radio frequency signal between the "ground" and the "neutral" and have the "neutral" act as antenna, which would solve the "are you on the same leg or not" problem, since the "neutral" is common to both 120 Volt sides.
Don't know how Underwriters Lab and the National Electrical Code folks would feel about it, though, or whether it might "confuse" Ground Fault Circuit Interrupters.
Anyway, I hope it works better than those NICs that used (or tried to) the telephone wiring--Home Phone Network Alliance, or something like that.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
So I just tied some CAT5 to her ankle and sent her into the attic.
So err... you must let her out for sunlight every now and then right? Sounds good otherwise.
like phosphorescent desert buttons singing one familiar song
Can't we wait till the interference issues with radio communication are sorted out? See The ARRL site on this issue.