Ethernet over power line (basically DSL) has become quite good these days, you can get fairly cheap 1gbe units today and unless you have some really crappy wiring with noisy appliances they don’t have many issues.
Bandwidth is alright-ish at about estimated 2MiB/s here (single pair, about 50ft apart), but RTT of ~4ms with occasional spikes in excess of 1s (at a different location, I've seen spikes in excess of 5s). This is only barely noticeable for accessing the WWW, but unpleasant for interactive GUI work (e.g. via NX or VNC) and a deal-breaker for cluster communication protocols.
2. TCP throughput suffers when non-congestion related packet-loss exceeds a fairly low value
Standards decisions should never be made to accommodate designers that want to assume there's effectively no packet loss.
Some degree of error correction is totally reasonable, but your first point is irrelevant to discussion.
(If all the packets are failing to go through for that long, then you have much bigger problems than the error correction.)
I backed off for now because I wasn't sure how well it would work in practice and honestly the speeds I do get are perfectly fine for what I do.
Curious if you or anyone else has recommendations on what I should be looking for / avoiding if I were to go that route and invest in some powerline ethernet equipment.
If your tests show > 1gbit of throughput on a device which has a 1gbit port, something isn't adding up.
You can see the link speed between the nodes in the TPlink app.
They also support LAG, I have two of the 3 ports LAGed to a Switch.
From what I can tell the biggest issue with these other than the wiring/noise issues is if people rely on them as a switch.
I used to have 3 devices connected to them (AP, TV and Xbox) switching to LAG and a proper 1gbe TPlink switch that ironically costs more than the homeplug more or less solved my issues but ymmv.
I also think that the UK residential power wiring that uses ring circuits might be better for homeplug usecases than other curicut types.
If you have time, could you run iperf3 (brew/apt install iperf3) between two computers separated by the powerline devices?
This blogger has some great examples: https://specklepattern.wordpress.com/2018/03/03/seven-genera...
The "2 gigabit" adapters top out at 470mbit when both sides are plugged into the same duplex receptacle. That number is cut in half when you move to another room, and it gets worse from there.
Every Powerline vendor, without exception, are using funny math when coming up with their advertised throughput numbers. In no situation will they ever be able to provide 50% of their stated throughput, and more typically it's closer to 10%.
They probably hit 2 gbps for 30ms on the same duplex with zero interference.
The apartment was completely rewired in 2015.