Comment by rr808

11 hours ago

Powerline networking is worth trying for this too.

As is MoCA, which in my experience is a lot higher-speed and more reliably so.

People tend to want speed, speed, speed, but tons of use cases are totally fine with a reliable 100 Mbps. For a lot of remote monitoring stuff, even 1 kbps is enough if it works reliably. Not everything needs to serve up a webpage.

  • for anyone else wondering, that new acronym means coax

    > MoCA (stands for Multimedia over Coax Alliance) is a technology that uses the existing coaxial cables

Yeah I have tried it! It beats WiFi to some rooms, but to my office it's very slow.

You would never be able to predict this, which is an unfortunate thing about powerline IMO. You just have to buy the modems and see how they perform on your particular wiring.

  • And how stably. Ours works amazing if you ignore that it duplicates packets 2-3 times for no reason (netting a few hundred megabits, many times the speed that VDSL is able to deliver here), but then it will die for a few minutes roughly once or twice a day, unpredictably. Thankfully we only need it for the bedroom and everything else reaches from a centrally hung 'router'. When it's down again, we briefly switch to mobile data or the poor signal we get from downstairs or we, y'know, get out of bed or turn off the phone and go sleep, depending on the time of day :-)

    It's a strange pattern and I'd be interested to solve the mystery. Not many powerline debugging tools available though, not to say none

Do you have personal success using powerline ethernet? I tried it once and it was utter shit.

A very expensive "up to 1000mbps" kit maxed out at ~200 when both devices were plugged into the same outlet. It just got worse with distance.

  • Just a bit of side opinion working rf and some electrical, and fully understand if that was the best you could get, but some outlets are wired on different circuits. Also, some rf devices get overloaded if you're too close and that can degrade performance. Not saying that's definitively what happened, but you could have been either too close or further than you thought

  • I tried this once too and instead bought a big-ass SRS bit and went through a concrete wall instead.

    Rock solid and reliable networking =)

  • (Repeating myself coz I saw this after writing my sibling comment..)

    It's highly variable in my experience. I've had it work pretty well in some situations and barely at all in others.

    I have certainly never got 1000mbps. I think I have got 300 at best. In my office I can only get about 50 even though it works pretty well in other parts of the same small apartment.

    ... Which is kinda annoying coz they aren't really all that cheap for something you have to just buy and then find out later if it actually works!