Do people not know power line ethernet adapters are a thing? Look if up on Amazon, you just plug one into the wall by your router and one next to your PC. Clean and strong connections.
This is as dumb as asking if people don’t know wifi exists. Yeah, pretty much everyone knows, but it has substantial tradeoffs to just running a long cat6 cable, one of which likely is plain cost.
There’s a few caveats to this. I had a good set of powerline adapters that still ended up with worse performance than a usb wireless dongle.
If the outlets are in different circuits or you have a house with old wiring there’s a good chance they won’t work
Granted I’ve only used it in 2/3 houses but they’ve always given me the best speed, at least in the past 5-10 years. They used to be much worse if you’re basing this on old experience. And also the oldest house I used them in only got 2MBps so it wasn’t exactly hard for them to get to top speed. My current place isn’t exactly new wiring and the copper cables still get my max speed of 11MBps.
Yeah you won’t get the full experience of gigabit connection through copper wall cables but I’ve never lived in a place with fast enough WiFi for that to matter. I much prefer a cable free house, I have a power cable going to my server in a cupboard and I really hate it, wish there was a power socket in there.
That’s fine if you’re simply trying to max out your net, but for large internal file transfers EoP are a nuisance vs GbE.
Depending on the model, and your electric network, you might get some disconnects though. Had that at my parents years ago, ended up doing exactly what the meme is
What in tarnation is this black magic? I don’t know how I’ve never heard of these before.
They’re good/reliable enough that it’s worth the £20-30 to try a set out. Although like another guy commented bad wall wiring can sometimes have effects if your router is really fast, I get my full 11MBps through my walls easily enough in relatively old housing.
11mbps, even if that’s megabytes not bits, is pretty fuckin slow as far as network speeds today. That’s either 1/100th or 1/10th of gigabit speeds, and a good Ethernet cable can provide well over gigE nowadays
Which only really matters if your actual internet connection can do the same.
Or in other words, it depends, so each one should try to get the right solution for their situation.
I didn’t realize that the only thing people used network connections for was Internet connections. Wow thanks for letting me know.
Lots of ISPs offer way more than 100mbps, many places offer past 1gbps. Even if they don’t, there are many LAN-based things that run even if you don’t know they do. P2p software updates are widespread now. So yeah “it depends” on whether you care about a fast and stable network connection.
Not to mention, power line is a shared medium, much like wifi, so if you have two computers, kiss even your already slow speeds goodbye
First, I suggest you read the last 12 words of my post rather than reacting to your own interpretation of my comment as a personal dig at you.
Second, Ethernel over Power sharing is only up to the first circuit breaker, whislt WiFi sharing is only limited by metal surfaces, walls and distance.
This means that in some situations (for example appartments in appartment buildings) EoP “sharing” is entirelly dependent on what devices a person puts on the same electrical network (i.e. the power line branch sharing the same circuit breaker) whilst WiFi is a complete total hellhole of everybody screwing everybody else.
Further, people sometimes rent the place they live in, not own it and getting permission to run wire along the walls might be impossible whilst investing in improving the landlord’s property by having wire run within the existing paths inside the wall (usually shared with power wire) is usually not exactly smart.
So Ethernet Over Power is a possible solution that should be considered in light of the situation and used if appropriate or discarded if not.
Looking at and evaluating the various solutions in light of the context is the Engineering approach to solving problems, so it makes sense to present a possible solution in a public forum when one’s intention is to help others.
A self-centred “it’s not good in my situation hence it’s shit and anybody who says otherwise is insulting me” take does nothing to help others.
My original comment was about how slow Ethernet over power was and you claimed that only matters if your internet is faster. There are lots of situations where you’d run cable where that statement isn’t true. If you had said “sure it’s slower but it still works sometimes” that’s a wildly different statement than the equivalent of “speed only matters if it’s the bottleneck to the internet”
Power line adapters are usually fairly separated by different circuits, but that’s far from a hard limit. Just because there’s not a reliable connection between two circuits doesn’t mean the medium isn’t shared and interference can’t happen - it is very much like wifi through a cement wall or two.
In no way am I personally offended, I just used some sarcasm to show how inane that original statement is; and those kind of statements are everywhere in networking discussions.
Yeah, it’s an old house and I’m not paying for gigabit internet because whenever I have I’ve literally never gotten the advertised speeds. I’m sure it’s good enough for 99% of people, I have the best internet of all my friends lol. But yeah, you won’t get the full gigabit speeds through copper wires if that’s what you can get from your router in other ways.
Pretty sure nowhere apart from ugly new builds and student housing really gets modern internet speeds in the UK. I got one dude who’s still in the same city as me on like 10mb/s. My other friend just bought unlimited 4g because it’s better than their shit WiFi.
If your house is wired for cable and you’re not using it, they also have MOCA which is way way better.
Coax cables are wicked fast and you can use them alongside network switches to get LAN all sorts of places you’d normally have issues.
thanks for this!
Just be careful, they can be pretty expensive and often way way slower than advertised.
The main reasons I use them are places you lack WiFi coverage, where reliability is more important than speed.
I’m guessing Ethernet would be transmitted over the electrical wiring? if that’s the case, if your house have different circuits it wouldn’t work?
It actually CAN work across circuits, I believe, but it’s significantly degraded. Like 5-10 Mbps bad.
From my experience, power line adapters are very hit or miss depending on your house setup. I’ve had power line adapters that couldn’t even get above 10 Mbps. I feel like the next best thing besides just straight up Ethernet cables is something called MoCA adapters. They use the already existing (in most houses) coax cables, which allow for much higher throughput and very consistent connection. I’ve had peaks of 850-900 Mbps with 10ms latency using MoCA adapters.
Yep. Got one transferring 1 gig fiber between floors, and the upstairs regularly gets full speed through it. Highly recommended if you can do it.
If I wanted to do powerline best I could do is get 3 rooms next to me, certainly not floor above or below me.
I always wonder if I’m introducing bad latency by running a 100 ft ethernet cable.
Then I remind myself it’s the speed of light.
It’s either deal with the distance with a wireless network (which can’t even reach my current bedroom in my house) or deal with concrete walls that also cuts down the Wi-Fi signal in my new bedroom.
Then again, my home’s network is due for an upgrade because it’s 17 years old, so I just need to convince my family to upgrade to CAT6 cabling and a faster Wi-Fi router.
Mine runs from the top floor all the way into the basement!
Do y"all not use the magic adapters that you plug in by your router, then by your PC to make a lan cable out of the electric wiring? That improved my cable management so much
Those are called Powerline adapters and they are so easy to use and secure. I use them so I don’t have to drag cables across the house
Power over Ethernet adapters have some serious limitations. MoCa adaptors which use existing coaxial connections, even if you have cable internet, can provide greater speed and better latency than Poe. To be honest though, copper ethernet or fiber ethernet or generally the best way to go.
Drill through the walls or be lazy and run a cable over the roof
To clarify, powerline adapters are what you mean. Power over Ethernet is just that, providing a current over an ethernet cable.
1.21 jiggawhats worth of power over Ethernet
How are your upload/download speeds using those?
Faster than your internet. Probably not a good option if you want to hook up a NAS, though.
Not as good as normal lan, but much better than wifi, and is easier to manage than a 50ft cord, so pros and cons
I used to have them. They work in a pinch, but it’s not the most solid connection in the world from personal experience.
It’s all about compromises. Aside from a massive solar flare ravaging the earth or a small rabbit nibbling on the wires, there’s not much that will disturb the signal using an ethernet cable. Wifi is sensitive to other wifi and various home appliances, PLC can easily pick noises from a faulty device anywhere in your house (or your neighbor’s…) and have to reduce speed to maintain an acceptable signal/noise ratio, etc.
This sas me back in the day lol so funny 🤣
How many are 100ft?
100
30 meters.
Thanks
30,48 meters.
Come on, be accurate. The metric system isn’t based on random body parts or things laying around that came in handy once upon a time 400 years ago
My double-brick house really suffers with WiFi, and I work from home so I almost permanently have an Ethernet cable to my office. My fiance has gotten used to it at this point
Are you…are you in the walls?
Wifi is actually really good these days. I would be surprised if you could notice the difference given a wifi router in a decent spot.
Yea, I just moved into a little apartment that only has wifi from the landlord’s house. I was skeptical about it, but it’s been almost a year now and not a single problem with it. I used it for my PC, cell phone, TV and tablets. I have never had to ask my landlord to “restart” the modem.
It really depends on what you are doing and what you are expecting to get out of the experience. For instance, streaming a game from a gaming pc to a Steam Deck or other portable unit works best when the pc is wired to the network.
But that’s why you would put it near the router so you don’t have to use 100 ft of cable to do it, so meh.
Yeah, unfortunately my house is pretty old, so there’s exactly one spot I can place a modem/router. I could centralize the router, but it always ends in a cable 🙃
I use my steam deck to stream games over wifi. I cannot notice the performance difference between wifi.
Well, I use mine to stream games over wifi and it works better when my pc is wired. Different situations require different set ups. That’s the beauty of having options.
When I set up people to work from home and see some of the WiFi set ups they have, I just tell them to go wired if they can. They wonder why their internet is slow when they have one AP and it’s on the other side of the house. Also it’s the one their ISP provided and it’s 10 years old.
In my countries the routers can all do a gigbit down so I think its better to use wireless unless you have a really large house.
$400 Wifi⁶ mesh router vs one $10 wirey boi
I did this for every device in my house. used flat ethernet cable and just fished it under the carpets. Was significantly cheaper than trying to make wireless reach the other side of the house.
Flat ethernet cable
What?!! I did not know this existed!!
You can also buy devices you plug into the wall and route your network through your power network. Used them to give my detached garage wifi. Works pretty well.
Based on my research, you get the speed of 2.4 ghz wireless (which while it works, it could be better) with the inconvenience of having to use a cable. Performance also depends on wire insulation, which often isn’t built for running PLC. However, you can’t beat the “plug-and-play” of wired there, which might be attractive.
I’d recommend getting a mesh router setup, gives you 5ghz wireless over the whole house (assuming proper setup), and some mesh points support wired output (effectively having a wireless bridge)
Can be unreliable though based on what else is on the circuit. Had a portable ac that completely took my power line ethernet connection out whenever it ran.
Yeah they’re great! I got a super long flat white one and those little white plastic staple things you can lightly hammer into the wall, and ran it along the baseboard of the walls, makes it nearly invisible! It was a bit tedious to do (which is why I haven’t yet redone it in the place I live now, although I will), but honestly I super recommend it. My partner wanted to try and run cords through the walls but I was way too nervous about what might go wrong, so found this solution instead lol
upgraded to a 3 node G mesh. it just works x10 years https://store.google.com/product/google_wifi_2nd_gen?hl=en-US
Easy I have either cable but no family, my PC is happy too :)
You could just use 2 Ethernet Over Power adaptors (not to be confused with power over ethernet).
After all, it’s not as if the powerlines aren’t already installed at home and connect all power plugs with all other power plugs.
This isn’t even new: I’ve been using this solution for about a decade, back when it could do a mere 20Mb/s (which was still way faster than my Internet connection could handle back then ;))
Unless having a 500Mb/s limit on bandwith is somehow unacceptable when you could have Gigabit ethernet. Then again, why not fibre all the way ;)
My experience is that you need to be sure the outlets are on the same electrical network, otherwise it doesn’t work. When I did get it to work it seemed to be reliable.
Have you ever paid attention to packet loss?
Honest question, because I’m an electrician and Ethernet is so fickle, I’ve always assumed it would play hell on the overall quality.
I used ehternof power for many years and although I didn’t look at packet loss I never had a problem with it.
The whole thing is layered into multiple levels (go check the OSI Model and its Layers on Wikipedia if you’re willing to go down that specific information hole ;)) and the physical layer should mainly be handling packet loss on the connection between those adaptors, transparently to the higher layers that just see that as lower bandwidth than the spec for the adaptors (a spec which is really quite optimistic, IMHO).
Yeah, a cable with a metal sheaf wired to the GND level (i.e. Cat cable) is going to be way better at higher frequencies and at isolation from noise that two twisted copper wires were the network signal is shared with a different “signal” which whilst generally 50/60Hz (depending on country) can have spikes and noise at other frequencies, so it’s never going to be the same.
However for example at home right now I can get a reliable 100 Mbit/s over a pair of those adaptors from my router to my PC and the speed limitation is actually (I believe) from my old router not supporting Gigabit Ethernet rather than from the adaptors which are supposed to handle up to 500 Mbit/sec.
That said and as somebody pointed out, it only works well if the plugs you’re connecting are on the same electrical network, as transversing coils isn’t exactly great for high frequency signals.
it only works well if the plugs you’re connecting are on the same electrical network, as transversing coils isn’t exactly great for high frequency signals.
What does “electrical network” mean? Panel? Circuit?
If two plugs are connected to different circuit breakers, then they’re in different “electrical networks” in this sense: basically for a signal to go from one such plug to the other one it has to transverse both circuit breakers and that means going through coils.
Coils are inductors, which are electrical elements which have have frequency dependent resistance (in simple terms), with the higher the frequency of a signal the more the resistance they offer to the passing of a signal, and the higher the bandwidth of your data connection the higher the frequency of the signal(s) necessary to transport that data.
So electrical network == circuit, got it.
I learned this stuff in a different language so don’t really know the right terminology in English.
Also I’m from the Electronics side, so for me a “circuit” is something quite different ;)
Ah, in home electrical, a circuit generally means the same thing as electronics, but at 120V and around 15A (in North America).
It definitely can be finicky. I had a portable ac that completely killed the power line ethernet connection when it ran. And my current house I have it in i use from where my router is to where my main TV is and it is unreliable even without that AC unit. So it definitely depends on the circumstances.
They let me go in the attic and run the internet line into my room (it was a 75ft cable). Now we use 5G, but are planning direct fiber once our city halves cost for service.
