High-speed powerline: Home connectivity without the cables Whether you’re a fan of the Internet of Things (IoT) or just a user of home technology, for many Reg readers IP connectivity is something that you probably want just about everywhere in your home, whether it’s to WhatsApp from the bath, or for things like media streamers and smart TVs in the living room. Compared to five years …
My TP-Link 500mbps adapters seemed ok - until doing a long automated trawl of internet sites. Then it was found that the link failed, and sometimes locked up, several times in the run. Nothing was on the mains that would cause obvious noise spikes like central heating etc.
A wifi Edimax N300 plugged into the ethernet port of the PC doesn't have any problems talking to the broadband router for hours on end.
The HomePlug-style adapters are now only used as the back haul for the usually unused secondary WAP.
I have some old Netgear plugs, they haven't caused any lock-ups in the last 4 years. It certainly improved things in the basement, where my home office is. I was getting about 256kbps out of my 802.11g and n routers, with the Netgear plugs I get around 50mbps, I certainly get the full 38mbps that my Internet provider gives me on my 35mbps contract - yes, wow, they actually deliver more than they promised!
Streaming HD video from Amazon for several hours doesn't seem to cause any problems, neither does the continual back-up running around the clock to Carbonite from my PC.
I've been thinking of upgrading to Devolos recently, but other priorities...
I had to throw a load of these power line jobbies into a house where the Sky box simply refused to do WiFi anywhere else but in the front room and even then you could only connect whilst you were in the same room. When I did a scan, I found a neighbour to the back of the house was belting out three SSIDs across all the 2.4GHz channels and the output power was almost off the scale. For some reason all the photons were pooling up in my friend's kitchen; some weird lay-line type anomaly probably... there was bugger all mobile phone signal on any network either, but 30 foot outside on the road had 5 bars. Freaky house. The RCD kept tripping out as well, and the light bulbs keep blowing. I advised her to move.
The UK Radio Ham have for many years been lobbying OFCOM to ban powerline equipment.
When you celebrate your minor victory of getting your internet connection routed to a previously unreachable part of your house, I bet you don't realise that you just turned the unshielded copper wiring of your house into a giant aerial which is now spamming the airwaves with wide-band white noise. Any Radio HAM living within a mile of your house will now be unable to receive numerous stations from around the world.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/05/ofcom_plt_response/
While OFCOM say there is 'no proof' of noise, a quick search of Youtube will reveal videos made by various HAMs demonstrating otherwise.
Nightmare.
I had been rather dubious of this in the past, until a neighbour from about 300m away accuratey identified either mine or the adjoining house as a user of homeplugs that was interfering with his amatuer radio equipment.
Knowing it was the neighbour using it (as my old ones had bizarrely managed to join his network) the 3 of us had a chat and he demonstrated the interferene. He was a very nice chap and offered to buy replacement ones for the neighbour that are notched correctly (his were £20 jobs off ebay of unknown origin). He really shouldn't have had to do that though.
It's not *just* amateur radio (ham) operators. It's also an issue for anyone that likes to listen to longwave, distant AM broadcast band, or shortwave radio.
The DC to 30 MHz spectrum is a precious resource due to the natural long range nature of the propagation, and it's a darn shame that it's being polluted with so much unnecessary man made noise.
Indeed, my heart sank seeing this puff piece for such HF and, increasingly, VHF noise generating crap which demonstrably fails QRM regs., with manufacturers abusing the self-certification process, and "regulators" who fail to act, and then mangle the reporting procedures so they can claim there are no complaints. The reg should know better.
If it were a "puff piece", I think I'd probably have omitted a whole section titled "Falling out of love," in which I discuss the problems that simply turning something off can have, and I'd have completely ignored the audible interference I mentioned I can hear on my kitchen sound system, following the installation of a 1.2Gbps unit.
I wouldn't have talked about "major hassle" and being "wary of HomePlug for the long term" either, I expect.
Now, I may not be as critical as you want me to be, but I certainly don't think pointing out these things makes it a cheerleading piece for HomePlug either.
"It's also an issue for anyone that likes to listen to longwave, distant AM broadcast band, or shortwave radio."
And there's more...
Who here knows how VDSL works (BT Infinity and friends, the so-called "superfast fibre broadband")? And its derivatives and follow-ons too.
Here's a hint. It's not fibre. From customer premises to street cabinet it's your plain old copper (hopefully) telephone wires. You may well have known that.
What may not have clicked is that VDSL is long, medium, and short wave radio **down the telephone wires** - the DSL standards use the same frequencies as the various AM broadcast bands (and more besides).
So wideband RF splatter stuff like PLT, that interferes with short wave radio, likely interferes with your DSL broadband too. Most of the time for most people it's not too bad, and proper "notching" has helped in a few specific narrow frequency bands. But as more Homeplug stuff is deployed, the general RF noise floor gets worse, which makes high speed DSL more difficult, especially in the presence of certain kinds of line faults. And heaven knows BT already have more than enough trouble with the commercial and technical issues of DSL faults.
"The DC to 30 MHz spectrum is a precious resource due to the natural long range nature of the propagation, and it's a darn shame that it's being polluted with so much unnecessary man made noise."
Amen to that, brother.
This PLT stuff isn't fit for proper CE approval. It's a scandal that it's even allowed to be sold. But BT plc wanted it on their "BT TV" list of parts, so they got it (much to the disgust of the BT plc DSL-related development people, who just make this stuff work, but don't generate any visible amount of direct revenue).
> While OFCOM say there is 'no proof' of noise'
Really?
Ofcom Propose to Prosecute Owners of Bad Powerline Network Adapters
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2015/01/ofcom-propose-prosecute-owners-bad-powerline-network-adapters.html
In fact between 2013 and 2014 the regulator said that 13 different types of apparatus were “found to be causing undue interference“, which Ofcom said “identified a distinct and important need for intervention“.
More power to them if they finally do clamp down on the cheap crappy stuff.
Some particularly noisy ones were issued by BT to connect their router to your TV. These caused a ruckus and BT withdrew them -- but it makes you wonder whether the current management appreciate how much their forerunners at the GPO contributed to science.
The models in question didn't work anywhere in my home and interfered badly with my hifi.
More recently tried Netgear models -- worked but not everywhere in the house.
Talk about Kanute and the tide.
Cnut's demonstration was intended to show his sycophantic followers that he was not all-powerful, and could not command the tide. No-one would have been more surprised than him if the waves had rolled back.
Also, comparing CB to amateur radio is a little bit like comparing a McDonald's burger flipper to a Michelin-starred chef. Both fun in the right circumstances, but the latter has a lot more training and qualifications, and can do a lot more with his kit.
What has Amateur Radio and CB got to do with each other?
Oh yes, they are both used by millions of people daily.
What would you say if someone dumped toxic waste up stream of where you were fishing? its OK for them as the poison is washed down-stream, spoiling your pleasure.
Grow up and think!!
" gwangy" - you're not the sharpest tool in the box, are you? The vast majority of the developments in wireless communication that you take for granted came from the "Radio Hams" you deride.
You wouldn't have wi-fi, mobile phones, portable and mobile radio communications, and high quality TV (we'd have been stuck with the Baird mechanical system if it hadn't been for a group of keen "amateurs" at EMI)..... Try to imagine the emergency services without radio communications.
Powerline adaptors - of all sorts - cause massive interference - pretty much from DC to daylight. They even interfere with each other!
the noise also pips across the radio spectrum where police, national defense, and other useful services live. in the UK, those services use less power than they do here across the pond in the US, so the interference from PLD is more noticeable. in the US, the "smart meter" set at the power companies have been pushed into VHF shared services for their transformer monitoring and air-conditioner remote shutoff gear because of trying and failing to get their stuff to work without burying everything else where they wanted to park their transmissions.
It's junk, it fails EN55022 by a typical margin of 40dB (10,000x) and shouldn't be on the market. In fact Norway had the sense to ban them from their market. The whole idea of putting HF, VHF and low band UHF (in the case of g.fast) onto a leaky unmatched and unbalanced feeder is going to radiate. manufacturers know this and is why they have coded notches into the damn things.
To quote Beavis - "TP for my bunghole!"
I gave up SW listening in the 90s with my last receiver, a lovely British designed Lowe.
Even in the 90s where was sufficient digital rubbish from appliances and gadgets to prevent clean listening.
Sold it to someone who presumably lived on a rock in the North Sea.
Today if I want a quick DX I go to a virtual receiver e.g.
http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/
(search websdr for more)
Books, TV, now SQ receives, what device can't be replaced by the internet?
I've tested lots of these over the years and the bottom line is if they work on your home wiring then you're fine, if one has problems they all will, don't even try it on wiring that is of any vintage and be wary about crossing from one circuit to another, as you'll experience significant signal loss. I haven't found any model that works well in my environment and eventually put in a wired wireless bridge to plug a dead spot.
If you have lots of fixed low power mains powered items, it's often worthwhile to fit IEC (kettle lead) mains plugs on them and get an IEC connector strip or two. These are readily available on ebay. This saves a lot of space and the leads come out vertically, which helps with space saving and lead stess.
I also use a TP-Link 5-port switch for any group of two or more items that need a network connection because the cost is less than that of a HomePlug adapter. I recently upgraded to Solwise AV500 and the major factor for speed seems to be my mains wiring (especially downstairs to upstairs, going through the fusebox, with old fashioned fuses) since the speed increase is not much over the old 84MB/s ones I had.
Well, it's not the only security camera in the house; just the one that causes most concern, for some reason :)
I can also use it to check on the cats when I'm away, as they curl up in the chair or on my bed.
The mere suggestion that it might ever be used in conjunction with the sort of remote controlled sex toys I wrote about here is, of course, mortifying.
> a fan of the Internet of Things (IoT)
If you're a true geek you'll be rolling your own IoT out of ESP8266's and looking seriously at the possibility of configuring them as a mesh network. Given that they are < £5 a pop, any geek's house should have these in every room (they also work as wifi APs and stations) and should be hooked in to the home internet, too.
I use exactly the kit you have pictured here. I've had a piggy 6 and a single port 200AV for several years and they've been Ok with only a couple of re-pairings needed.
Exactly the point of your article, more devices needing networking, so I bought another piggy 6 but the 3x system lasts barely 24h before needing switching off and restarting and usually repairing. It's now a PIA and I have CAT5 strung across the floor.
Not entirely sure it's Solwise's fault, it's probably "noisy mains" it seems to have happened since I started charging a set of IP phones - small chargers are particularly bad at introducing noise on the mains.
...and guess what else has been multiplying exponentially in the home over the past few years...small chargers.
Yes, I was wondering that. Where once most of the things plugged in were chunky devices like TVs or PVRs with proper grown up power supplies, there are an awful lot more things now running with cheap plug-top PSUs - besides the phone, there's now the tablet, there's a test PVR, the PSU for the Raspberry Pi, the Roku, ChromeCast, VoIP phones, and so on - so, compared to when I first started using HomePlug, there's probably a lot more noise than there was in the past.
> small chargers
Hear hear. Maybe it's just my luck but I've always had a lot of trouble with impulse chargers when it comes to Powerline Ethernet... In the end I went for pulling CAT6 everywhere I could and using WiFi (with bridges and repeaters as needed) where I could not.
The thing that really surprised me about homeplug was the latency. Granted I've got a pair of budget Trendnet devices, not sure which gen, maybe 200mbps. Ping to the router through homeplug is about 10ms, which is the same as pinging one of my servers in a DC from my router (ADSL). Compared to less than 1ms over Wifi.
It's a new-build flat, which I know doesn't guarantee good wiring. I don't think the brand of adaptor or the homeplug standard version would make too much difference to this though, I'm assuming the latency is simply down to the conversion/transmission protocol. Anyone able to elaborate?
I'm not dissing homeplug in the slightest, it just works and blows my mind really. But I was just surprised at this level of latency.
Unless I've just got duff homeplugs and other people get lower latency?
How are you measuring your ping times?
In the brief period when I had HomePlug things, I found that UDP-based stuff tended to fall over rather frequently, whereas TCP stuff didn't have so much of a problem.
Why's this? Because TCP stuff has retries built in, but UDP doesn't, so whether a UDP application sees a problem or not is dependent on the application/protocol design.
Ping (as in ICMP) is neither UDP or TCP as such. Similarly with DNS. It's more like UDP, but the application typically has retries built in. But retries won't be immediate - if a sent packet is corrupted so badly that no valid data is visible, the receiver can't say "send it again" because there's no packet to resend. The sender has to wait for a while before deciding whether to re-send the packet.
So if you have lots of intermittent noise in this picture, you will get lots of intermittent packet loss, TCP will survive if you're lucky. UDP might not.
I get <1 ms on the AV500 home plug kits I've provided for my family. I'm surprised your wifi is so low latency, mine varies wildly from 1ms to 50ms.
The ones I've provided for my are all to ensure that wifi signal extends in to the rooms they want it to extend to. I used "TP-LINK TL-WPA4220T", which is a £60 kit with one base station unit and two extenders, the network signal is sent of PLN to the extenders, which then have a built in wifi AP. The APs support WPS push button setup, and the PLU is also PBS, took all of about 2 minutes to pair to the base unit and Virgin superhub, and get my (nursing) sister online in the room she likes to sit in when feeding the baby.
I think its the first time she's ever appreciated that I'm a techy ;)
So you run along the floor and ceiling corners, snake under doors, and so on. When you move, you can just pull it all up to please the landlord. Find this to be a useful technique not because the house I was in was rented but because all the walls (including the interior ones) were cinder block.
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