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Comment by baby_souffle | Hacker News Reader

> The house I live in was built with ethernet, but of the fourteen outlets the builders saw fit to include, not one is located where we can make use of it.

I had a similar situation a few years back. It was a rental so I didn't have access to the attic let alone permission to do my own drops. It'll depend a _lot_ on your exact setup, but we had reasonably good results with some ethernet-over-power adapters.

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Ethernet of powerline adapters a very YMMV situation. Occasionally, it works great for people, but more often than not, the performance is poor and/or unreliable, especially in countries with split-phase 120/240 volt power (where good performance relies on choosing outlets with hots on the same side of the center-tapped neutral. The people who most commonly share success stories with powerline Ethernet are residents of the UK, where houses only have 2 wires coming in from the pole and there's often a ring main system where an entire floor of a house will be on one circuit.

A better solution is repurposing unused 75Ω coaxial cable with MoCA 2.5 adapters, which will actually give you 1+ Gbps symmetrical. The latency is a very consistent 3-4ms, which is negligible. I use Screenbeam (formerly Actiontek) ECB6250 adapters, though they now make a new model, ECB7250, which is identical to the ECB6250 except with 2.5GBASE-T ports instead of 1000BASE-T.

That was my experience too. The experience with powerline ethernet adapters was unbearable on a daily basis.

We had an unused coax (which we disconnected from the outside world) and used MoCA adapters (actiontek) and it's been consistently great/stable. No issues ever... for years.

> A better solution is repurposing unused 75Ω coaxial cable with MoCA 2.5 adapters

I'll second this. MoCA works. You can get MoCA adapters off Ebay or whatnot for cheap: look for Frontier branded FCA252. ~90 MBps with a 1000BASE-T switch in the loop. I see ~3 ms of added latency. I've made point-to-point links exclusively, as opposed to using splitters and putting >2 MoCA adapters on shared medium, but that is supported as well.

We have them at home as well and they really suck. They lose connection every 20ish minutes at best, and take about 5 to reconnect. Makes Zoom meetings impossible, among other things.

I’ve used Ethernet over coax in my current apartment.

It’s worked well!

You do need to be a bit careful as coax signal can be shared with neighbors and others sometimes.

You can isolate your ethernet over coax from your neighbor with a MoCA POE "point of entry" filter which blocks the frequencies used by MoCA.

You can buy them online for around $10 and they install without tools,

Besides neighbors, you may also need a POE filter if you have certain types of cable modem.

cable companies require poe filters. if they find that there is some "noise" leaking from your house, they may put a big filter of their own outside, that can degrade speed of modem

For PoE you want two networks for the best performance. One for each phase of your mains.

In general they do suck, but they can be pretty decent if you stick them all on one phase, even better if all on the same breaker.

Powerline Ethernet != PoE (power over Ethernet)

Yes, no idea what I was thinking when I typed that. I've used both extensively, in fact this message was sent over a PoE enabled WiFi AP.

For maximum comedy, I'm imagining running powerline ethernet to supply a network drop to a PoE switch, which then powers the AP.

I have literally done this many years ago. Not a Cisco 2960 or anything fancy, just a dumb 802.3af PoE switch.

I used those during covid to get a reliable connection for video calls and it was a huge step up over wifi. The bandwidth was like 1/10th of actual gige, so I got a wire pulled to my office when I went to fibre but there’s no question in my mind that decent powerline adaptors are the winner for connection stability.

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