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Comment by Obi_Juan_Kenobi | Hacker News Reader

While obviously not as good as Ethernet, the internet-over-power-cable (powerline) solutions aren't a terrible option.

In my apartment, the biggest issue I face is interference from other wireless routers. Because of this, the powerline performance is about 40% faster on my desktop (right above the router one floor) and much more consistent. It also does help with wireless congestion, and really helps with using my desktop as a PLEX server. Before, higher bitrates would cause serious issues, and now it just works.

I'm not sure if the tech has matured recently or I just had a good use-case for it, but it's miles better than WiFi. I'm using TP-Link's product.

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One current high-speed option is a MoCA 2.0 network through the existing coax, which has bandwidth up to 1 Gbps. I have a MoCA adapter next to each TV, wire the television through Ethernet from the adapter, and hook up a WiFi repeater as well.

I'm a network engineer so I have a "proper" setup at home: fiber-to-the-home, enterprise-class network devices (access points, switches, etc.), and so on. We were at Best Buy a while back and, while browsing around, I saw some of these "powerline" adapters on the shelf and, mostly out of curiosity, decided to buy a pair [0] of them to see how well they worked; I was doubtful of the "1200 Mbps" claim on the box.

For testing, I plugged them into AC outlets along the same wall in the same room, with ~14 feet separating them. After getting them linked up (very simple), I connected laptops to each unit, manually assigned IP addresses to the laptops, and used iPerf [1] to run throughput tests.

I'll spare you my rant about them but peak speeds were extremely disappointing, just shy of 50 Mbps. I honestly didn't expect anywhere near the advertised 1200 Mbps but I was expecting speeds relatively close to what I can get over my existing wireless. 50 Mbps may be quite acceptable to some, especially if one's Internet connection isn't that fast, but it was far from acceptable for me. They would also randomly "freeze" or "pause" for 20-30 seconds at a time but I didn't really investigate that issue.

[0]: https://www.netgear.com/home/products/networking/powerline/P...

[1]: https://iperf.fr

Yeah, they have been very unreliable in my experience as well. Totally not recommend.

Also the idea of willingly putting noise in the electrical grid seems sketchy to me. I used to live in a house where I could not get good noise-free audio because the line was not a pure sine wave and most consumer PSUs were crappy to let noise through.

I've had powerline everywhere in the house and ended up ripping it out and just putting in ethernet cables everywhere. Powerline is really great for 99% of users, but I wanted to stream games from one PC to another, and use Remote Play form my PS4 - and over powerline, packets just had some weird random latency from time to time, making local streaming impossible. It runs very smoothly over ethernet now.

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