Chicken wire under the plaster in the walls?
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This is news?
I mean I figured people knew this, but most of the time when I offered it as a solution to customers they wanted wifi.
Also keep in mind that PL adaptors can be finicky or not work at all if you have an old house with idiosyncratic wiring.
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Metal lath or chicken wire, something along those lines anyway. It only seems to be in some of the walls though.
I looked into these a while back, the the consensus of the internet was that powerline ethernet sucks, though at best it can be OK if there isn’t another good option.
Some things to keep in mind, based on a plethora of reviews:
There is no relationship between the listed rate and the actual rate. These things are typically listed at e.g. 1200Mbps, but you’ll actually be extremely lucky to get 300. Some people reported more like 5Mbps.
There was literally no situation where anyone got within 50% of the listed performance, and it often varied drastically throughout the day based on whether appliances were turned on and so forth.
The actual performance will be worse the funkier the house wiring is between the two points, and of course houses that need these also tend to be houses with old, funky wiring.
Some models have problems with dropouts and the like, though apparently that’s gotten better.
Anyway, in the end I decided to just run some Cat5e like a normal person and it was great (and also cheaper).
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Thank you! This needs to be said more often.
On a note closer to home, modulating your home power will harm your electronics. Sure, everything seems fine but everything also fails years before you expect it to. There is a reason we have a market for AC line conditioners.
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We do? I have recycled more than a few 50+ pound constant voltage transformers for the copper. Nobody wants 'em, not even the 15 amp ones. I can’t give them away. At one point there were six of them on the shelf in my garage, but I recycled the last one on Wednesday because they were caving in the shelves with their weight.
I have not had any of the problems you mention in my 180+ year old house, but I agree that any time you can use a wired Ethernet connection, you should! Wireless bandwidth should be conserved for portable devices, and as @jlw already said powerline ethernet is only for “the most difficult dead spots.”
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It’s hardly surprising, since most things beat WiFi. Including ethernet cable. In this house I barely even trust the wiring to distribute electricity, nevermind data. Just like the last place I lived, I simply run ethernet cable to replace some of the coax which I don’t use.
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Is it faster with less latency than wifi?
Why? Is there a radio wave shortage at your house?
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Shirtcocking is for the Playa. And if you’re there, you shouldn’t be messing with ethernet-over-power-lines. Even in Center Camp. Or Boing Boing for that matter. Especially this weekend.
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I’ve been saying it for like, five years now. Powerline ethernet is FAR better than WIFI inside a house. Walls and architecture get in the way. Why not just use the ALREADY THERE electrical network which, in my experience at least, supports up to 800mbps speeds, and you can also plug a WAP directly into an powerline ethernet adapter. So you can have wifi pretty much wherever you have power, and still be on your house’s LAN. Best part: you can use magnetic chokes plus a small transformer to keep your ethernet from getting into the public grid. But so far I haven’t even had to do that. It dies at the pole transformer.
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I have a house that was moved 10 miles, and has been repeatedly retrofitted and renovated since it was first built in the 1940s. It’s current incarnation is dominated by 1960s hardware. And I’m getting 800mbps via the electrical wiring. It’s a freaking miracle of technology, and cheap too. I suggest you try it.
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I’m wondering how the owners of my last house felt. My dad (IBEW electrician) and his friends built it a year or so before I was adopted. And It was a good house as far as I remember. Dad put in a multi-zone sound system. One mixer in the living room that independently was able to play different things in the living room, kitchen and mom and dad’s bedroom. In wall speakers, the works. But the dining room had a hole in the wall for him to pull cable that he didn’t finish. He ran out of steam, then my brother and I completely drained him of energy (along with sarcoidosis) and we ended up selling the place in 2000 and moved to a nicer hood where there were people.
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Ugh. Shirt cocking is for nowhere. Everyone knows that.
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Have you tried flat Cat6 under a skirting board? That’s how we get the signal from one side of our upstairs to the other, at which point the router is effective. Popping a baseboard or molding then reattaching is not much work.
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Yes. Teenagers expand usage to fill available bandwidth. (Parkinson’s daughter’s law.)
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Haha! I didn’t think of that! Ok, I stand corrected. The modern equivalent of when parents would install a second phone line so their teenage son or daughter wouldn’t tie up the line. And I have a possible solution for you: a second wifi network. Just install a wifi access point (most wifi routers can be configured as a wifi AP/switch). If you can run some Ethernet cable to the other side of the house, you get the additional benefit of better coverage in those rooms where the signal is week. I have a pre-teenage neighbor that comes over to use my wifi internet connection. I never thought of it in terms of that second phone line for a teenager, but that’s pretty much what it is.
—Sent from Boxer | http://getboxer.com
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Yeah, that’s a good analogy.
I do a fair bit a traffic shaping at the routing nodes. SSH connections from wired hosts have top priority, and wired IPs always get better QOS than wireless. Streaming media on iPhones gets lowest precedence 
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Before moving we had to get an electrician in to replace the very old fuse box with a breaker panel and I know some circuits are not grounded properly. So umm no. And like I said the wifi works great.
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I’m a ham radio guy, yes, we still exist. I HATE these things. They generate huge amounts of noise across the shortwave radio spectrum.
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