Comment by omnicognate
6 hours ago
I've been using this for a couple of years in my home now, with the same German Gigacopper devices. It's rock solid, very much unlike my attempts at power-line ethernet in the past. I used ethernet over coax in my last house too, which was also great.
I think many (most?) UK houses could get gigabit ethernet to at least some rooms without any new wiring. It's strange that the devices for doing it reliably are hard to get, but powerline ethernet modems are sold everywhere despite barely working in most houses.
My experience with powerline is they can work well for low activity, but they all overheat if you actually use them continuously, and the advertised speeds are extremely misleading as they are before error correction (which is very significant) and for the whole network.
My guess is that the nature of them being in a power plug means that they struggle to isolate things from the mains for safety in a way that doesn't also make them hotboxes.
I didn't notice overheating, but there are a quite a few different products on the market.
The modest speed (~50MBps at my place) was then ok-ish, but the (variable!) latency of a couple of ms was annoying (it tended to break pacemaker/corosync cluster communication). And every once in a blue moon they stopped working altogether and needed to be un-plugged.
Worst, for someone interested in analogue electronics, they emit (of course) a huge amount of electrical noise into the power lines.