netflix only wants 25 Mb/s for 4k. Of course that’s heavily compressed, but the same could be said for “fast enoigh to stream 1080p”.
“about 80 Mb/s” is a more concrete measure of speed. thanks.
This is worth repeating. I did a Ctrl-F in this thread for “Arc Fault” and “AFCI” found nothing. Arc Fault circuit breakers, typically found in newer homes, will almost certainly interfere with or degrade performance for Ethernet over powerlines, and you may live in an area where an AFCI breaker is necessitated by your local building code.
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I tried a pair of powerline adapters a while back, but they didn’t work well in my house with its rather strange wiring scheme (circuits in the addition are on a sub-panel instead of the main distribution panel). If you can swing it, it’s far better to just run some Cat 5e.
This is true, for sure, if you only need to do one room (or don’t need to add any rooms in the future). One nice thing about the powerline adapters, though - if you need to add an extra room, all you do is buy one more adapter and plug it in (ok, and maybe sync it up). Very little effort compared to running a cat5e line from your router all the way to the new room.
Please avoid these devices, especially the cheap ones,
Power wirings are not designed to carry radiofrequencies. Using these will turn your house into a giant unefficient antenna. I’ve seen ham radio operators unable to work the HF bands because of the noise generated by these things.
Funnily enough, the interference works the other way too; for the one that was causing us problems, it turned out we could force it to reboot by sending a strong signal at the right frequency.
If you want to have a single wire for connected devices, PoE is an increasingly cheaper alternative and will give you a much more reliable throughput.
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THAT.
If it can emit, it can also receive. And more or less everything is an antenna.
Or you can splice the cable and have a power injector on one side and power wire on the other one. Generally the blue-bluewhite pair is positive and brown-brownwhite pair is negative, for the most common spec. For 100Mbit ethernet the orange and green pairs are enough.
I’d expect that’s drastically against the TOS, and that the cable company would never agree to it on the principal that two people paying for the same thing individually is far more profitable than two people sharing something that should be a utility with a regulated price anyway.
Ah, likely so, thanks for that thought. I wonder, though, how they’d actually know…
Technically they could figure it out.
Let’s say you have a 1/2 acre plot, as does your next-door neighbor. The demarc from the ISP comes into your house, where you have a WIFI router, your equipment, and a cat5e cable strung over to your next door neighbor’s house. Now say that cat5e cable is terminated with a switch, which has a wifi router/ap plugged into it too.
Now say you both have any modern cellphone with a GPS, and that it’s set to use wifi at home, each on your own wifi network.
If the ISP is suspicious of connection sharing, they could do deep packet inspection, pick up both of your phones reporting in their location to google with about 1m accuracy, and they can see that the wifi keys are different and that the phones are on two different properties.
It’s not like a cellphone’s reporting in is encrypted particularly well. Pretty much anyone can get a cellphone’s coordinates with a little money, but ISPs can get that stuff by just asking.
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Ugh. Those bastards!
Well, thanks anyway. I’ll have to look closely at the TOS.
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Seriously though, fuck the ISPs. They’re rich enough, while sitting on their laurels compared to any other developed country in the world (except Canada which somehow manages to have worse internet than the US.)
Anyway, I don’t think they’d care enough to take the trouble to figure out if you’re sharing your connection with a neighbor. It’d be pretty obvious that something’s going on if, for instance, you were sharing with the whole cul de sac, but just two “average usage” houses wouldn’t be too much different than one “heavy usage” house.
I run a web server, I occasionally live stream video out to twitch, I fairly regularly VPN into my PC at home from work or out in the world and do screen forwarding (VNC type stuff), I sometimes stream movies and TV shows off my hard drive to my friend’s houses so we can watch Jin Roh (it literally took me years to find and digitize a watchable copy of that movie), or something. My machine backs up most of my data to a cloud storage server every 24 hours, so that’s a few terabytes initially and then maybe a few dozen GiB a week.
The ISP never has complained. They just started throttling me. So I complained to the BBB, because I’ve been a customer so long that my original TOS didn’t stipulate that they reserved the right to throttle me, and the ISP let up. Getting grandfathered has it’s perks.
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These things are pure evil. They radiate RF all over the spectrum because they are using an unbalance cable network not designed for RF (because that’s what this is) and the hash leaks out all over the place. They claim the signals stop at the fuse board, but they don’t the RF ignores that passive device and can be heard for as much as a mile away.
They interfere with loads of important services, Airband, the military, DAB radio, regular AM/FM radio, The emergency services etc. Have a look at the information and actual evidence gathered on http://www.ukqrm.org.uk/ and http://interference.org.uk/forum/ It’s quite revealing.
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Those websites seem to be UK specific. The versions in the US are all FCC compliant (or the ones that submitted to testing were). So they’re pretty much legal. I haven’t picked up any interference with my own set, and I have a police scanner running 24/7 rebroadcasting out to the internet using powerline networking wall-warts. So while I don’t doubt that sometimes they produce EMF in some cases, it’s not enough to concern the FCC.
In other news, they’re actually not “junk” as those links like to repeat, but are actually quite good at their intended purpose within the limits of the infrastructure they’re connected to.
What alternatives do you propose that don’t involve the possibly hundreds of dollars/tens of man-hours to punch holes in for instance brick and masonry walls, concrete and structural elements to run Ethernet cabling when the structure and absorptive properties as well as the current wiring of the building rules out repositioning or even use of wifi or line-of sight?
If I could just, pump 10 extra watts into my wifi setup, I would, but that’s also very illegal and would screw up everyone else’s wifi APs in the neighborhood. I can’t afford to have people run cabling in my house, and I don’t want to punch holes in the walls that would reduce the property value by several percentage points. I also don’t want to interfere with radios, but so far I haven’t picked up a single dB of EMF from my own set of devices, so, what problems am I causing?
They’re a workable solution to a common problem that many people have. They often allow us to work at home when we otherwise would have to turn to much more expensive, involved alternatives. Ham radio is a niche hobby that’s fundamentally superseded by the internet these devices deliver.
I have excellent experiences with WRT54GL wifi router. Can cover an entire floor with three apartments in an old thick-walled brick building that was before served with three separate accesspoints. When reflashed with OpenWRT, can handle quite a lot of other services and can run tcpdump to debug connections. (It is limited by internal flash and RAM, disk space can be extended by a network disk.)
Beware of EMI injected to the power lines. Various devices (X11 home automation, etc.) use power-line coupled communication and they could be crippled. Debugging such issues without the measuring gear is then quite a female dog.
Wouldn’t structural cabling in place actually INCREASE the value? Especially if the cable layout is documented?
The ones you don’t see, most likely. 
(Which you could soon, for cheap, using SDR-based spectrum analyzers. They are appearing as a worthy competition to the eur1000+ Spectran ones.)
Also, here are some nice videos about the interference from the power-line adapters:
This is exactly why if you stop in front of my house you get all the wi-fi you need.
Has it been a problem in the past with neighbors using too much and impacting my streaming? Yes, I have blocked specific devices for several weeks, but not since our recent move. But I have been on the needs wi-fi side of thing so often in the past that there’s no real reason not to leave it open.
Sometimes I use my sprinkler to water my neighbor’s lawn. And my other neighbor’s light points at our shared driveway. This is like that.
I was wondering about that. I wouldn’t want to have to unplug everything just to make a simple QRP transmission.
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I have not tried to do it, but my guess is that running ethernet from point A to point B in a house is not best accomplished by making a wire go from A to B. It is best accomplished by making a wire go from A go to some out of the way spot by whatever route is easiest, and a wire from B to that same spot by whatever route and then putting a router or switch at that nexus.
That way you can run the wires up into the attic or down into the crawlspace or basement or straight down a wall through to the outside then down and back in or whatever.
Personally, as a renter, I just bought a wifi router with MOAR POWAR! ran 30 feet of ethernet behind shelves, etc to put it in the middle and managed to get wifi through the steel-mesh-smeared-with-concrete walls in my building… just barely.
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Oh, and for amusement try making a reflector for your wifi antenna out of foil and cardboard.
That was fun, and it actually helped, but not enough.
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I just had to insulate WiFi router by placing it on oak blocks, placed a small polished stone of quartz on top of the router, and another stone of the same weight in each of the rooms with dead-spots - and all the dead-spots disappeared! I had to fiddle with the positioning and rotation of the stones for a little bit [oh, and they have to be DRY!], but it was worth it! See, the stones act as natural WiFi resonators, boosting and cleaning the signal flow from the insulated router (it won’t work if the router isn’t insulated - the digital WiFi signals will drain straight into your flooring). This is easily the smartest thing I’ve done since hiring an attorney to get those manslaughter convictions expunged from my record.
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Not in a 70 year old house that’s got nearly all original structure and fixtures in it. People buying particularly old houses in my neck of the woods like everything as intact as possible. So punching holes in the walls is frowned upon.
