IF that all sounded confusing and you’d rather go powerline, keep in mind that if the distance you are running the network is sufficient and crosses circuit breaker boundries, your performance on powerline will suck.

I’d strongly recommend getting the fastest powerline pack you can, because the *actual* performance is usually like 1/4th what the advertised speed is for any normal/typical setup.

Thanks for circling back and letting us know about mixing-and-matching. Also curious which adapters you settled on.

For normal use, powerline is an awesome way to go. For severly bandwidth intensive operation they are on par with wireless which is a huge bummer for me as I agree with you, I’d much rather have a few Gigabit-capable powerline adapters scattered through my house and wire up everything that way then hobbling along with a wireless solution.

Let’s hope that HomePlug A/V Spec finally brings 500mbps+ speeds — which in practice I’m sure would be down around 100mbps, but even that is fantastic.

I knew about powerline networks and decided to switch and it is as good in all aspects as a single non-networked computer being connected directly to my ISP’s cable connection.

I did learn one very important thing. You have to have all of the powerline adapters from the same manufacturer. I tried mixing different manufacturer’s adapters (trying to take advantage of pricing) and they will not communicate with each other. And by the way, it does not matter who makes the router.

If you have both adapters handy and can try them out, I’d be curious to know. If you don’t and you’re just curious, I’d strongly recommend you buy two matching adapters.

PLC is not dead!

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

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.

thanks

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?

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

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

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)

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.

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