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vogon
@vogon

since I've lived in this house I've used powerline networking, which is still an idea that I find fundamentally Wrong1, to connect the networked devices in my room to the wi-fi router in the common space, but for the past month or two I've been having weird network drop-outs every couple of minutes.

I decided to switch over to bridging my network segment to the wi-fi with a little wi-fi range extender now that we have a fancy wi-fi 5 or 6 or whatever router, and suddenly the bandwidth to my room has tripled (from ~60mbit/s to ~180mbit/s) and the drop-outs are gone. I guess there's no wires like no wires.


  1. you're not supposed to mess with the electricity in the walls! what the fuck man, that's how you start a fire


Turfster
@Turfster

Yeah, don't use Powerline.
Especially not if you live in an ancient terraced house and you're using a generic brand, because if your neighbours are also using it, they might very well be able to access your networked machines.

I Suffered So You Don't Have To


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in reply to @vogon's post:

i remember looking up powerline as an option for a previous place i lived in and it truly felt like the most Wrong shit. just a clear case of "i guess all metal is kind of just metal and you can do whatever with it". i HAVE to imagine this has caused a fire somewhere, at some time

It's pretty safe as "things that seem wrong" go - the Ethernet from the computer is converted into really low power long wave radio signal on the wire so there's isolation between the transmit/receive and the modulator/demodulator. But it is very limited in speed in even the best case scenario. Speed and reliability are affected by radio interference in the area that gets picked up by the power lines in the residence (unsurprising that lengths of metal wire are nifty antennas!) and also can be clobbered by totally unrelated appliances that have filters on their power input to eliminate such high frequencies. GFCI outlets will chew up the signal too. Kind of a marvel it works at all let alone as well as it does (when it does)... Exactly as you found, though, the advances in WiFi are leaving only niche cases for powerline networking. Airpixies go ZOOM!

Yeah I've never had a great experience with powerline, and it's easy to miss that they suggest using it on a single circuit, which no one would, that's like in the same room! But also that in the US we often have two "120v" rails and signal across the wrong pair of outlets has to go outside your home and back in addition to the two breakers. And it's all in the same broadcast domain! These things are good for like a third of their claimed capacity 😩 or less!

If the WiFi solution doesn't work out long term, MoCa might be useful if you have coax already run. I don't think it's as well known an option.

At my old apartment, I had been playing Apex Legends via powerline ever since my friend helped me diagnose that my apartment was too long for wifi to get to my makeshift kitchen office without a range extender, and he happened to have powerline adapters he wasn't using anymore.

It had worked totally fine for me, in an albeit 100+ year old house, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's more of an exception than the rule

lena and i we're doing this for her office + the apple tv since the office is much further down the apartment and after the constant connection issues we were having that one time she just connected to wifi w/ the wifi 6 router we have and she was yeah, getting like double or triple the speeds she had through power line lmao. like ultimately the problem was just that our old router sucked.