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Comment by sergius | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget Ethernet over Power... works great on some houses and you don't need to lay out cables. But if you can nothing beats wiring the hole house.

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I thought about doing either powerline networking or CATV cable. We have CATV to every room and aren't using it. After some research, the speed and reliability seemed quite questionable.

I'd prefer to run Ethernet, but one portion of my house, the part that has most of the devices, is really hard to wire to my standards. I should probably just find a pro to do that run, or bite the bullet and either do some drywall work or put up some crown molding to get that run.

I'm afraid I won't know where to stop though. :-) If I'm gonna do drywall work in the spare bedroom, I might as well pull it ALL down. If I do that, I might as well run some more power circuits, seal the HVAC ducting. I might as well remodel that closet. Which might mean taking space from the closet for the basement bathroom and laundry. etc...

I have an illness. :-)

Nah, you're totally normal. Renovating is like opening a can of worms. No matter what happens, the scope of the project will always balloon once you find out what inside the walls.

Our house has single-wall construction, so I'm immune to that illness. There is, by definition, nothing hidden in the walls. ;-)

Stuff like this, water damage and insulation make me think we are putting walls together wrong. I have no idea what the solution is but this is the pits.

I remember finding out Americans build walls differently than Europe. The stories about finding insect nests in walls sound insane for me to this day.

Well, old buildings follow old building code or none at all. There are still a lot of 100 year old houses here that were built without insulation, and a void is gonna look damned attractive to wasps, bees, and smaller birds.

Interior finish work is expensive, doing it over to put in insulation is even moreso. And to add insult to injury, the low R value of walls is a data point used by siding installers, to try to talk you out of ripping the old stuff off before installing new. Each layer has an R value, dontchaknow...

I use MoCA (over CATV) and it's really solid for me. Price has come down, you can get motorola devices that support MoCA 2.0 bonded which can provide around 800MBps for $60. Latency is in single digits with minimal jitter, compared to powerline, which doesn't play nice with the AFCI circuit breakers required by code in most US cities now, and also has pretty bad latency and jitter.

I also made sure to use a proper MoCA cable splitter, as well as installed terminators on the unconnected end points.

Which single digits? Single digit seconds? :-) Milliseconds? Microseconds? Just wondering... Looks like my local gigE at work is 0.3ms machine-to-machine, for comparison. And at my data center, pinging google.com is 0.6ms. :-) At home I have nothing close to that though.

Anyway: This is a fascinating idea. I had looked a year or two ago and the options didn't seem as good. What adapter are you using? I'm seeing mostly an Actiontec for around $90 each. I need to check my head end, but this might just be plug-and-play to reach 2 of my hardest to cable locations. I started thinking about just running some fiber along the CATV runs (along the outside of the house), but that'd be more of a pain. Especially getting the terminated ends through the wall. I'd want to run fiber since it'd be exposed to possible lightning, but I guess the CATV cable is similarly exposed. Hell, maybe I should just run some shielded cat6...

Anyway, I might just try this MoCA 2.0, thanks for that pointer.

Single digit milliseconds. Unfortunately anything ethernet over X will have latency due to the underlying medium.

I don't recommend Actiontec, I had a fairly expensive adapter go bad on me after about a year. I replaced the other ones with Motorola MM1000, which are much more reliable in my experience, and I found for $60.

Thanks, I saw some references to the Motorola, and I've had pretty good luck with their gear in the past (15 years of Surfboards after a cable tech recommended it as having fewer issues than the others). But when I searched pretty much all that came up for my string was the ActionTec.

No one here has heard about Ethernet over Coax?

MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance) http://www.mocalliance.org/

MoCA 2.0 allows theoretical speeds of up to 500 Mbps (1 Gbps if bonded). This allows real world speeds of 1/2 to 2/3 of that.

Many houses have cable outlets.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2950015/powerline-vs-moca-wh...

Everything old is new again:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5

But no, I hadn't heard of it. (I realize the impedance and signaling is obviously different.)

MoCA adapters are much more expensive compared to typical Ethernet adapters in general but work in a pinch. I've moved frequently and have lived in older houses so I'm now armed with two different powerline Ethernet adapters, a pair of bonded MoCA 2.0 adapters (one is already included if you have a STB from a cable provider technically but the Ethernet port on it may not be a passthrough or bridge connection), and a Ubiquiti based setup. While the best option outside of direct CAT5+ cabling is the MoCA adapter setup, I'm disappointed that in most older homes with pretty awful wiring I can still only get 600 Mbps maximum. I know it's the house's cabling because in my previous house I used the same adapters and got a clear 850 Mbps for a slightly longer cable distance. Sometimes a signal booster [1] helps but tends to boost the wrong frequencies if you buy the cheaper ones that were meant for older, analog broadcast in a home.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Splitter-Signal-Booster-Amplifier-Int...

Gah, don't do that if you value your RF spectrum. Those types of devices should be banned as they turn the untwisted electrical lines in your house into a giant set it antennas.

If you have any ham radio neighbors ethernet over power is basically a jammer.

Do they increase the actual power emitted or just create interference? i.e. should one be concerned health-wise if many of those are used? (assuming one believes in RF in these frequencies being harmful).

It's kind of a pointless question. If you believe RF can hurt you, it has no bearing on the fact that it can't and doesn't.

well, high enough levels of RF (ie, well above routine public exposure) can burn.

Sure, and if you stare into a focused microwave emitter you'll cook your brains.

That's like saying light is harmful because looking directly at the sun or a high-powered laser will blind you.

Focused beams are outside the scope of this question because we're dealing with cell transmitters.

One time I tried using these. The internet worked fine but connections to other things on my network was very intermittent. I found out that I was switching between my own router and my neighbor's. The signal was traveling out of my house and into my neighbor's over the power lines.

I do not recommend Ethernet over Power any more.

I don’t understand, what you’re saying doesn’t really make any sense. Were they also using Ethernet over power devices? Even so they typically have a setup process that negotiate the encryption keys between devices in your own home.

> The signal was traveling out of my house and into my neighbor's over the power lines. I do not recommend Ethernet over Power any more.

For what it's worth, you could turn on the built-in encryption within most Powerline adapters. (Usually a button labeled "Security" or similar). Then you can leak anything you want, and still be reasonably safe.

http://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/PL1200/202-11566-...

Wi-fi has this exact same problem, with basically the same solution.

Used this for a couple years since the wireless sginal was weak where my room was, and using a 500 MB/s device was decent. Though a couple times a week it would randomly drop out for several minutes which required unplugging/plugging back in the device. Not sure if it was due to the wiring of the house or what; it seems like it'd be a hard problem to troubleshoot. The Powerline standard has only gotten better though with time. As little as ~7 years ago there were only 50 MB/s devices. They now have gigabit-level ones.

In my experience this works worse in newer houses with modern (more complex, less transparent) electrical systems, and at best you get sub-WiFi speeds.

You have little to lose by trying, but there’s no guarantee it will work at all, even less work well.

It has improved a lot in the last few years, in case your experience was from a few years ago.

I have a very old house and it works well for me.

I think you do best to have just two stations in a powerline network situation because the contention and overhead of contention control is much less. (Compare that to gigabit ethernet which is full duplex and switched so there is little or no contention)

You can connect a "distant" powerline NIC to an ethernet switch and plug multiple devices into that if they are close together, that works better than plugging in multiple powerline NICs.

Unfortunately new houses have circuit breakers that detect broadband noise caused by arcing. These are good for catching fires early, but will blow if you use powerline NICs.

I have an older house that has been expanded several times, with some rather amateurish wiring. One outlet works, the one next to it doesn't. Slow speed, interruptions that require resets...

Google wifi pucks work much better, in spite of the cinder block walls.

Like PaulHoule, I have an old house, but with a new electrical system. It was proudly rewired by yours truly, with GFIs and AFCIs all over -- and an added subpanel.

Anyways, I use a set of powerline adapters with a second wifi router at the other end because the walls in my house are very thick (the studs are covered in shiplap on both sides). The throughput is fast enough to stream video on the other end, but I haven't put it to any measured test.

In the summer, I often take the whole setup to one of the outdoor plugins, so that we have solid wifi on the deck. So it can work quite well. Whether it will in any given circumstance is uncertain I suppose.

Seconded - if you're going to try Powerline networking, buy your equipment from a retailer with a generous returns policy.

The theoretical throughput is lower, but I found the real-world performance for network filesystem access specifically was wildly superior. Never determined exactly why- latency? dropped packets? but 10-20mbps powerline links mopped the floor with 200mbps wifi links, even with only a two foot airgap.

(These weren't label-advertised speeds, these were the negotiated links)

Watch out for latency issues if you use Sonos and perhaps other wireless speaker systems.

I used ethernet over power myself for several years when I rented a house, and it worked well for me. Recently, a friend was having wifi trouble (old house, thick plaster faraday cage walls). I suggested ethernet over power, and it worked great with one exception:

They have Sonos speakers, and Sonos just would not work with it. They apparently are very sensitive to latency. The ping times were roughly 50ms (from memory) between the 2 ethernet over power adapters.. I guess Sonos takes synchronization quite seriously.

What sort of PoE adapters was your friend using? PoE adapters should add minimal latency as they just use a center tapped ethernet transformer to separate the DC power from the AC ethernet signal.

He's talking about Powerline networking, not PoE.

Powerline networks (Powerline AV and g.hn) send ethernet through the electrical wiring.

Of course! I'm so used to PoE that power line networking didn't cross my mind. Thanks for the correction.

I do that because the house is rented and I can't make holes, but the ethernet ports lose connection far more often than I'd like.

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