Loading ...In this article I’m going to discuss some of the trials and tribulations I went through to build a well-connected high-speed home network using a combination of wireless and Powerline networking technologies.
The Problem
Building a “fast” network at home can be tricky. Most folks (including myself until recently) have decided to go the wireless route for their devices. The devices I have in mind that use this network are typically:
- Laptop
- Desktops in other rooms
- Video Game Consoles (XBox 360, PS3, Wii)
- Media Players, Slingbox, NAS, TV (in some cases like Pioneer Plasmas)
The idea being that except for the first one, most of those devices are not mobile in the physical sense. They stay in one location and most likely have an Ethernet jack on the back of them in addition to the wireless functionality they may offer.
For folks that live in a 1-bedroom apartment, their wireless signal is likely strong enough that they have never had a problem. But for folks in a long single-story house, multi-story house or just any house where it’s possible to get a weak or dropped wireless signal and don’t have the option of running cabling or don’t want to… it seems like all hope is lost. But it’s not…
Wireless Or Bust… No?
A lot of people don’t realize the options they have available to them when building a home network. The choices seem to be:
- Wireless network
- Wired network using Cat5 or Cat6 cabling in the walls
I know this was certainly the only options I thought I had when we built our house and I asked our builder to pre-wire Cat5e cabling but instead they adding extra power-outlets to every room… at the time I thought I was doomed, but now it looks like that might have even been better.
The trick here is to look into Powerline devices. Simply put, these are devices that will carry an Ethernet signal over your existing powerlines in your house. There are some obvious limitations like shitty-wiring in your house or trying to bridge a signal across circuit breakers won’t work. But for MOST folks that live in 3000 sqft houses or smaller, it “just works”.
They have been around for quite a while now and I took the dive with the original NETGEAR XE102s (14 mbps):
While 14 mpbs isn’t going to win any land-speed records, at the time (4 years ago) it was the best I could do because my only stable wireless choice than was a B or A network. B was more common but crappier speed and A was faster but less common. So I decided to take a gamble and it paid off in spades, the adapters were plug and play.
The Situation
Now the situation I face is that I just got an Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ box that supports Jumbo Frames and Gig-E networking and it’s plugged into my Wireless-G network. The performance and latency transferring large files is not great and I know it could be much better. I was recently looking into upgrading my Wireless network to a Wireless-N network (even though I suppose the spec isn’t finalized) but unfortunately all the reviews I was reading were completely mixed bags. Some people loved it, some hated it, and a lot couldn’t get it to work at all. That is usually the sign of a brand-new technology that people are effectively “Beta testing” for the companies.
I have better things to do with my time.
So I decided to check in on my Powerline device-friends and see what they have been up to in the last 4 years. I ran across the 3 main contenders right away all under the guise of “HD Streaming”… I guess that’s the new marketing buzz pushing fast networks:
NETGEAR HDXB101 (Single HDX101)
Linksys PLK200 (Single: PLE200)
Panasonic BL-PA100KTA (Single: BL-PA100A)
NOTE: Because at least 2 devices are required to establish a network, 2-packs exist for all these devices as a SKU from each manufacturer. The “Single” notation in parens is the model # to the individual devices if you want to add more than 2 to your network (for example, I need 3)
To give a quick summary, it looks like Powerline adapters are up to 200mbps now. In reality it translates to performance of roughly 35mpbs-50mbps running on a real network, transferring real files. Folks that have dealt with networking before know that the max-theoretical number on the device can never be hit and the real number is much lower.
Also for people curious about it, these devices are no longer bridges like my NETGEAR XE102s are. You can plug a family of these devices around your house, and they will all connect to the master receiver which should be directly linked into a switch or your router more than likely. So at a minimum you will need 2 to get a network started, but you could have 3, 4 or 10 all plugged throughout your house.
At approximately $50-$70 a pop though, you might consider getting yourself a switch and seeing if you can consolidate some of those connections because it can get fairly expensive to plug one of these in per device that needs a network connection.
As an example, here is a topology map from NETGEAR’s material of how this stuff works:
The Research
Now the process of figuring out which one to get began. Here are the resources I read through:
- NETGEAR HDXB101
- Linksys PLK200
- Panasonic BL-PA100KTA
**This reviewer complains about the need to plug the adapter in with a cord multiple times, but then nothing else being wrong and praises how easy it was to use. I don’t entirely trust this review especially given the glowing remarks from all other reviews seen.
So you can see from the benchmarks alone that the devices are ordered above in Faster-to-Slowest ordering. Unfortunately, if you actually read the text of all the reviews, the gist seems to be that they are also ordered Flakiest-to-most-Stable too.
I saw enough consistent comments about the NETGEAR HDXB101 being flaky, dropping connection, crappy speed and constant renegotiation that it dropped off my radar as an option. One of the most tech-savvy posters reasoned that the crappy performance and stability was due to the chip inside the NETGEAR devices, he said:
Netgear really made a poor decision using DS2’s 200Mb solution chip. These devices are really poor performers at any price. It’s better to go with their 85Mb adapters that use the Intellon chip. If you’re looking to stream HD TV, it’s better to look into the HomeplugAV 200Mb technology using the Intellon chip. Their reliability and performance is far better than the DS2 based 200Mb technology.
Interesting.
Conclusion
So now the choice was down to the Linksys that seemed to perform almost 10 mbps faster than the Panasonic, but the Panasonic offers a slightly lower price and seemingly rock-solid operation. Also on a personal note, something that really struck me as “awesome” that Panasonic did, is on their Technical Specs page for their device, they list honest-to-god speeds for UDP and TCP traffic of 70 mbps and 42 mbps respectively. When you take these numbers and compare them to the CNET numbers which are lower and then to the only other source of benchmark info I could find of 14 mbps from Glenn R. Huebschmann’s review on Amazon, you see that the Panasonic has been out on the market a lot longer (almost a year) and while stable, seems to perform much slower than the Linksys.
Normally I would trade stability for speed, but with such a speed gap, seeing consistent comments by users saying they were achieving 40+ mbps connections with the PLK200/PLE200 devices and 24/7 support from Linksys for the device (with the Panny, I wouldn’t know who to call) I leaned towards the Linksys devices for my network.
So now with the PLK200 + PLE200 picked out, I decided to augment my final network plan with 2 Gig-E switches.
- NETGEAR GS108 – 8 port, Jumbo Frames, for entertainment center (3 consoles)
- NETGEAR GS116 – 16 port, Jumbo Frames, for office (2 desktops, Powerline adapater, NAS)
The reason for choosing these switches, as opposed to a brand-matched Linksys was that they were the highest rated switches that supported Jumbo Frames that I could find.
While Jumbo Frame support on the switches is important so the “backbone” of my home network supports them, unless the Powerline adapters support them it won’t matter.
I wasn’t able to find any information on the Linksys PLK200 or PLE200 supporting Jumbo Frames online, no matter how hard I searched. So I posted this question to the Linksys forums. I’ll keep this blog entry updated when I get a reply.
Fortunately in my network layout, the only devices linked via Powerline adapters is an Office-only desktop and my 3 consoles… none of which need Jumbo Frame support for more performant huge-file transfers.
Closing
I hope this article has provided you with enough information to get started on your own home network possibly using the Powerline-based technology covered here to power it.
I still have a few devices (Laptop, PDA) that make use of the Wireless-G router I have, so that cannot be removed or replaced in my network, but the purpose of this upgrade and this article was to point out that for all the devices using the slower Wireless-G network, almost 80% of them didn’t need to, and could instead be put onto a wired network with likely a 50 mbps connection to the rest of the wired computers on the network.
Update #1: A few folks pointed out that “Jumbo Frames” is a concept introduced with Gig-E networking and that anything under 1000 mbps isn’t going to support Jumbo Frames. So to answer my question above, none of these adapters or devices in this speed range support Jumbo Frames.
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June 24th, 2007 at 1:27 pm
Thanks for the info. I’ll be moving into a new house in a couple of months and have been trying to decide which netword infrastructure to go with (cat5, wireless or powerline). I have a need for standard internet access, but also want to go with a DVR/media PC and make it available to multiple widescreens.
June 24th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
Dave,
Congrats on the new place. Is it going to be a one story or a two story?
At this time Wireless-N seems to be a totally hit or miss thing, so scattering APs around the house doesn’t seem to be a solution just yet (but hopefully in the next few years).
July 18th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
I have a Gig-E switch that supports “jumbo frames”, do ALL of the devices on the network need to support jumbo frames for the network to work? For example, I have network laser printers with 10/100 interface. Also some older PC’s with 10/100 cards.
July 19th, 2007 at 7:18 am
Earl,
Luckily no, all the devices should work fine, and if you have any other devices hooked to the switch that *do* support Jumbo Frames, then those devices will work even faster. But 10/100 devices will just work as normal.
September 11th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
hey how do you make the speed faster if your in a dorm room and every one on campus is trying to go off the same connection.
September 11th, 2007 at 9:26 pm
Jeffrey,
Unfortunately there isn’t much you can do about that because the bottleneck isn’t local to your room or floor, but instead at the university level.
In my freshman year of college we had that problem, it sucked… by my Junior year though they had greatly increased the bandwidth and helped fix the issue.
Just keep your fingers crossed.
November 26th, 2007 at 8:01 pm
Just wondering if you’ve had any problems with the linksys powerlines yet. I had the DLink powerline ones and after 3 weeks they died on me (got very hot)…so I’m looking towards the linksys now. thx.
November 26th, 2007 at 8:11 pm
Robert,
I did see that comment about the heat with the DLinks and crappy connections with the NetGears.
Of all the research I did the Panasonics, while the slowest, were the most reliable, cool and seemingly best designed.
As for the Linksys I never got around to ordering them as the Wireless N draft started to stabalize right around the time I finished the article, and the original Powerline adapters I got are still working (although not that great and slow as sin).
I would personally prefer a wired connection that the powerlines offer, but with Wireless-N bringing so much speed and improved distance with it, unless powerline ups the ante to double their current speed or *actually* delivering anywhere near the speed they report on normal lines, I don’t know that I will bite at the current price point.
So either they need to get cheaper or faster, because Wireless-N looks good.
November 26th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
Thanks for the quick response. I won’t be streaming any large volumes of data…just internet access to my laptop. The router is on the 2nd floor and the laptop is on the other end of the house on the main floor….wireless signal keeps dropping (very frustrating!)….still leaning towards powerline…i think
November 26th, 2007 at 8:31 pm
Robert, if you have done powerline before (sounds like you did with Dlink) in that setup and it worked, then the Linksys is probably a safe bet. If you pick them up from Newegg or any other retailer you should be able to return them if you end up not loving it.
Another alternative is to run a powerline connection from your internet source to the middle of the house, then throw up a wireless-N or G access point right in the dead center of your house.
That way everything wireless in the house gets the benefit.
You can get pretty creative with network topolgies
November 26th, 2007 at 8:43 pm
I like your alternative idea…I will have to try it…and have the best of both worlds! Thx.
November 26th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
Robert no problem. If you get a chance to followup after you’ve set it up and let us know how it went, we’d love to hear from you.
December 13th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
I am a novice at home networking, but am trying to set up a Powerline network for a home office. The remote device is linking to a VOIP phone adapter. I have only been able to get the Netgear HDX8101 devices (employer-supplied) to communicate once, and that was while they were in the same room. I want the devices to communicate about sixty feet apart and on the same floor in the house. Netgear says I might have an electricity problem; the electric company says the power is fine. (I know better than to plug them into a surge protector, by the way.) As it is, both adapters have power to them and there is ethernet activity on both, but the configuration software does not recognize the remote device. Can anyone suggest to me how to troubleshoot this? Sorry for the long post.
December 13th, 2007 at 7:20 pm
Brenda, the first thing to try is to take both adapters, and plug them in, in the same room. Then run the config software and see if you can get them to talk to eachother.
If you *cannot*, then there is something wrong with the devices and/or your environment might be hostile to powerline adapters, in which case you might consider the Panasonic adapters as they are the most resilient it seems.
If the adapters *can* talk to eachother when they are in the same room, slowly unplug one and move it farther and farther away from the other until you find the point at which they stop talking. It’s possible, if you had an addition in the hosue or something similar, that you are moving across the boundries of a circuit breaker, and most adapters can’t send a signal through a breaker.
So if you are in an older home and might be trying to get a signal from one part of the house into another that was built later, this might be the case.
If powerline isn’t going to get it, get your company to purchase you a Wireless-N router instead. Some of the newer ones have good range and speed on them that may allow you to work beyond the powerline issue if it won’t work.
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:46 pm
Riyad — thanks so much for the help. As it turned out, I bought the Linksys devices, which also were unsuccessful in extending the Powerline as far as I needed it to go. I did get it further through the house than the Netgear, however. But today I realize I have a new problem. The wireless instajack that used to hook our TIVO to the phone line is no longer getting a dialtone. The instajack is in the same room as the Powerline adapters; could they be the cause of its trouble??
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:01 pm
Doh, if it’s not one thing it’s another hu?
If you disconnect all the Linksys devices, and unplug/re-plug the TIVO and restart it, can it successfully get a dial tone? I don’t have experience with instajacks, but that should be a quick way to tell if the devices are conflicting with each other.
If your TIVO is new enough to also have a ethernet jack on it *and* you can get the powerline network working, you could throw another adapter in the room with the TIVO and hook it right to the powerline adapter and let it use your ethernet connection to get programming information instead of the phone line. (just a thought)
April 7th, 2008 at 10:30 am
Hi Riyad,
Thanks for the great info here. I am not new to networking, but I am to powerline networking. Currently I have a Linksys WRT54GS with DD-WRT v23 SP2 firmware as backbone of my home network. Wireless radio power output is set to 84mW and I have the high-gain antennas, all the laptops in the house consistently get 100%, or very close even in the basement 2 floors below where the router is. Anyways I am in the basement mostly and have 2 desktops and my laptop, but only 1 desktop is networked for now. I am looking at these power line adaptors to replace the cat5e cable running through the hall and down 2 flights of stairs for my desktop. My first concern is how will this affect my newsgroup (hey I am Canadian and the law here only says you can’t upload at the moment (well the court interpretation at least)) download speeds as I am on an 18Mbps cable internet connection and get most of that consistently, but only on a wired connection, wireless cuts that in half it seems even on a 54Mbps G connection. THe other concern I have is that all the power outlets in the basement connect to a secondary circuit breaker panel which connects to the primary panel. The router would end up connecting through the primary panel using a powerline adaptor. Would the signal pass through the panels ok and not affect performance? I was also wondering if I went with this set up would two basic powerline adaptors (probably the Linksys ones you suggest here) and a standard 10/100 switch be better than a powerline switch and 1 adaptor? Would you have any alternative set ups to suggest if powerline is not an option for me? Wireless-N is still not preferred as it means an expensive new router that may be be as rock solid as my current one (unless you can tell me if there is one that DD-WRT runs stable on). Also I will be adding a NAS and/or a Linux File Server in the near future and so there could potentially be large amounts of data travelling over the internal network whereas at the moment it’s mostly internet/newsgroup traffic.
Thanks in advance for any and all help and advice,
Daniel
April 7th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Daniel,
I’m glad the information helped. It sounds like you really know your stuff, to address your direct question about the powerline adapters, I have heard that they cannot pass through two circuit breaker setups… I’ve seen people complain before that they couldn’t get their powerline adapters setup *Because* they had a setup like yours (maybe a new circuit breaker in an addition to the house, and can’t connect it back to the main house).
Also I don’t like how slowly the technology has been progressing… there was the update to “200 mbps” 2 years or so, and the real speed is more like a 1/3 that in most cases… unfortunately I have seen no further specification updates to take powerline to the Gigabit level or the like which is disappointing.
I think if I had to build a super-fast network at home today, I’d look very closely at N since it’s the fastest you could do right now, and try and find strategic positions to place access points around the house that connect back to the central router, or wire back to the central router…
Otherwise if what you have now is working and it’s not a big pain for you, I’d say keep it until something else comes out that is signifigantly better… I’d hate for you to spend 100s of dollars and then not be that impressed with the end result
April 7th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Upon further investigation, it seems that HomePlug/Panasonic’s work to get IEEE 1901 ratified as a spec might be the “next gen” specification for powerline stuff, more here.
If that is the case, they met this Feb to get it reviewed, and I think they first met in October last year about it.
My guess is that hopefully by summer and certainly by fall this year we should see some beefed up powerline devices.
Who knows they might also address the cross-circuit-breaker issue and be easier to use in environments like that?
May 2nd, 2008 at 7:08 pm
riyad- i just bought an xe102 off of ebay and i was wondering in the item description it says that it will connect to netgear routers. i was wondering if i only have ONE xe102 if i can hit the router without having to waste the money to buy another one?
thanks
May 5th, 2008 at 7:32 am
Aaron,
Great question. The way the powerline adapters work is to bridge an ethernet connection over your existing wiring in the house.
So consider for example a normal wired (not wireless) router in your office. Let’s say you want to get the connection to the bedroom for a TiVo or something… withint running an ethernet wire down the center of the hallway, you might stick a powerline adapter in the office and connect it to the router… so at this point the signal is being “injected” into the wiring of your house.
You then need to go into the bedroom, stick another powerline adapter and it will pull the signal out of the line and allow you to hook a device to it… now you have a wired internet device in your bedroom.
So given that, I’m really not sure how a setup with only 1 adapter would work… (since you need one adapter to inject it and one to suck it out — bad lingo I know, but it’s all I could think of). This is also why these things are normally sold in pairs, after the initial setup of 2, you can then add them one at a time though to wire additional rooms.
Hope that helps.
June 18th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Is this thread died?
No more info is being posted here.
I saw some 200mbps adapters in the market but don’t know what is actual speed.
June 30th, 2009 at 8:43 am
zhr67,
The thread is dead for now because Powerline tech is all but frozen up… we’ve been waiting for HomePlug 2.0 compliant devices for over a year and they are no-where in sight. At CES Panasonic announced some new adapters we thought would follow the spec, but turns out they were just more of the “200 mbps” adapters which will get you in real-world performance, about 110 mbps in excellent setups and more than likely around 60-80 in most normal conditions. A far cry from a wired gigabit setup
June 30th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
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