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Comment by frankjr | Hacker News Reader

Another way to get something supposedly more stable than wifi when ethernet cabling is not feasible is to use your house's electric wiring and run data through that. There are kits which offer data rates in gigabits (although based on a few reviews I read the actual speed vary greatly).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-line_communication

https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/powerline/tl-pa70...

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The few times I have run into these, the actual performance is terrible. Wifi is almost always better.

it's been 10 years but I had great success running internet into the basement this way. Wifi was terrible down there (router was in the upper floor) and there wasn't an existing ethernet cable going down. Of course it wasn't perfect but it was trivial to set up and worked.

Same for me, my parents house had no WiFi signal downstairs or Ethernet in the walls. A powerline wifi extender kit worked out of the box and is fast enough for their needs.

I had a similar issue until I limited the amount of wire between the connections. For example I put one right by an outlet under my breaker box, then another in my garage right where the subpanel is and it improved dramatically.

Mine is, in theory, 2Gb/s. In practise, nearer 50Mb/s.

It also causes interference on my amplifier, although it's a cheap amplifier.

About once a year one of the adaptors loses its connection to the other adaptor, and instead connects to someone else's setup in this apartment building.

That shouldn't be happening, and is a massive security/privacy issue. Your power line devices should be configured to use an encryption key unique to them.

Yep, GP should do a factory reset on both, and pair them. If it stil happens after that, replace them with models that don't have this problem!

I was pretty horrified when I worked out what had happened.

It's from TP-Link, and supposedly does pair and create a secure connection: https://www.tp-link.com/sg/home-networking/powerline/tl-wpa8...

How does interference caused by the radio waves have anything to do with using encryption?

Same. It was great 10 years ago, but wifi speeds at this point make the wired through electric lines painfully slow. Even with the occasional wifi hiccup, wifi is almost always better.

Aside from the terrible and inconsistent performance, the bigger problem is the sheer amount of electrical noise introduced into the line which can adversely affect electrical appliances and devices.

Personally, I just don't find all the drawbacks worth it.

I tried this. It kinda worked. It also apparently leaks a lot of ... data? Interference? Something. Wifi seems to work just as well for us.

I never had good luck with that. Even on the same circuit, as instructed. The performance and reliability is really quite bad.

If your neighbors use it too, you could end up on each other's network

When I was a uni student in an old house with thick walls these were worth it. My bedroom had terrible WiFi - power line networking got me a few hundred mbps but the latency suffered.

ServeTheHome just published an article about powerline networking

TLDR: It's still bad.

https://www.servethehome.com/over-a-decade-later-powerline-a...

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