Powerline Ethernet

[Soulburner]

I need someone who has experience with this.

Can someone explain to me how the following works?

Coax cable from wall ->
Cable modem ->
D-Link DIR-655 Router ->
Powerline ethernet adapter ->

At this point, I get a bit confused. I have 3 IPs on my network (PS3, laptop, desktop). If I want them all connected through the power outlets, how does the data still get routed to the correct machine? Or does the powerline unit simply become an access point? How would you connect multiple computers through this?

What about speeds with these things? Am I better off sticking with my wireless G and N mix (PS3 is G, laptop is N)?

The reason is cabling. I want my desktop connected without running a cable across the floor. The router is in a closet on the other side of the room. I have the PS3 in the other room with wireless G, however if I could get faster speeds with powerline ethernet I'd rather switch to that, especially now that we are doing Netflix with the PS3. So in the spirit of running a high throughput network (a NAS is in the near future, a Synology DS209), faster than wireless but with minimal cabling, I'm curious about this.

Thanks.

[aythrea]

OH HEY! This looks familiar. A few years back D-Con or some other pest control company started advertising things to keep bugs out of your house by emitting a pulse through the electrical infrastructure of your house. Nifty idea, ...but I don't like the idea of adding additional surges to my gear.

That's the same idea as your Powerline thingy there. It basically turns your internal electrical into the medium for network communications. And they work in pairs.

Basically you plug one into socket a, and one into socket b. Socket A being the point closest to your network, and socket B being the point closest to your computer. What the Powerline box does is converts any communications coming across the modem (because that's what it is) into an electrical signal that gets picked up and demodulated by the the powerline box on Socket B. The rest of your network equipment does the remaining work.

It's a great idea. And it's essentially the same as Power over Ethernet... only reversed. More like Ethernet over Power.

Let's get to your questions real quick...
As a professional Network Technician, I suggest either sticking to your wireless configuration, or creating a wireless bridge, which would go something like the following:
(PC/PS3/XBOX/ETC)<->[Switch]<->[Wireless AP/Router]<---Wireless Bridge--->[Wireless N (existing)]<-> remaining network.

Since most home networks are capped at something like 3-5Megs at the point of presence, you shouldn't have to worry about bottlenecks from within. Wireless N offers 108Mb service. So if you have an N AP/Router, you can expect 100Mb service.

Hope this helps.
When you get your SAN/NAS device make sure it's on the network side of things rather than on the PC side. It'll save you from running cables.

[Soulburner]

OH HEY! This looks familiar. A few years back D-Con or some other pest control company started advertising things to keep bugs out of your house by emitting a pulse through the electrical infrastructure of your house. Nifty idea, ...but I don't like the idea of adding additional surges to my gear.

That's the same idea as your Powerline thingy there. It basically turns your internal electrical into the medium for network communications. And they work in pairs.

Basically you plug one into socket a, and one into socket b. Socket A being the point closest to your network, and socket B being the point closest to your computer. What the Powerline box does is converts any communications coming across the modem (because that's what it is) into an electrical signal that gets picked up and demodulated by the the powerline box on Socket B. The rest of your network equipment does the remaining work.

It's a great idea. And it's essentially the same as Power over Ethernet... only reversed. More like Ethernet over Power.

Let's get to your questions real quick...
As a professional Network Technician, I suggest either sticking to your wireless configuration, or creating a wireless bridge, which would go something like the following:
(PC/PS3/XBOX/ETC)<->[Switch]<->[Wireless AP/Router]<---Wireless Bridge--->[Wireless N (existing)]<-> remaining network.

Since most home networks are capped at something like 3-5Megs at the point of presence, you shouldn't have to worry about bottlenecks from within. Wireless N offers 108Mb service. So if you have an N AP/Router, you can expect 100Mb service.

Hope this helps.
When you get your SAN/NAS device make sure it's on the network side of things rather than on the PC side. It'll save you from running cables.

Max throughput of my Wireless N is roughly 7.5 MB/s (60mbps) in my own testing, and 4.5 MB/s (36mbps) with encryption, which is of course on full time (256-bit AES). The PS3 doesn't have N though, it runs on G. That's why I was interested in going wired with the PS3 if I could have it come in from the wall behind it. Not to mention in my office room where this desktop resides, I want to get rid of the ethernet cable running across the floor without going wireless and sacrificing throughput and latency.

The wireless easily allows full speed from my internet connection (12,000kbps or 1.5MB/s), but large file transfers through the network suffer and I'd like to make all media accessible through the home with high rates of speed without ethernet cables everywhere. What I need to find out is how fast these powerline things can go. Should I use the better CAT6 cables (monoprice) or do these things not go fast enough to use it? I want the 60MB/s rates that they test these NAS units at.

Yeah the NAS will be connected to the router and given a static IP. It will hide away in the closet keeping my router company, serving up files and doing backups in the background.

I'm not sure I understand the idea behind adding switches and bridges to my network, could you explain further?

Thanks

[aythrea]

Yeah. No problem. Basically what happens when you make a bridge is you're connecting two wired segments of a network with a wireless connection. It'd be like running a network cable from a hypothetical router to another router or switch. A bridge has not other purpose but to pass data. The thing is that once you've created a bridge between the two wireless AP/Routers that becomes their soul purpose. It's analogous to one radio station tower communicating to another radiostation tower.

The biggest concern with those powerline things is that every type of wire is prone to attenuation. That is, after a certain distance of cable, the signal degrades. You have know way of knowing just how many feet of house-hold grade cabling is running through your house, which is neither more pure than network cable, nor is it designed for a communications standard. Therefore I'm willing to place money you'll be sorely disappointed with them. Especially if performance is your goal. How Stuff Work - Powerline adapters

As for the switch on the pc side? It isn't exactly necessary, so long as you have a multi port source. Though... looking at my original post, I can see how this is probably getting a little confusing. And I don't precisely have the tools to draw it out as if I were in a classroom. --I'll try to work that out and come up with an illistration. But believe me, those Powerline devices are a good idea in theory, but in application they're bottom barrel. And I hate seeing people blow money on stuff when they don't necessarily need to.

[Serra]

Powerline Ethernet is a novel way to get a network signal around in a pinch, but IMO it should be used sparingly and preferably only as a stop-gap measure until a better solution can be introduced.

The obvious upside to Powerline Ethernet (I'll just call it EoP from here on) is that you can connect devices around your home together on a network without running existing cable and get at least enough performance for something like browsing the web. A pleasant bonus is that many (most?) manufacturers build in encryption between jacks, so you don't have to worry about someone plugging into an extension cable outside and intercepting your data.

There are downsides though. A large downside is that the powerline is a shared medium, meaning that every device you plug in needs to share the same bandwidth. A quick example is that if you have two computers on the line which operates at, say, 100Mb/s each computer will receive somewhere around 40Mb/s of service (assuming they both needed the full capacity of the line for some reason). Another downside is that the speeds won't be anywhere near what you could get with Cat 5e/6 network cable. So basically, it will work in a pinch but it's not future-proof or scalable. Plus it's somewhat like wireless networks in terms of susceptibility to environmental noise and how the wiring was put in, so it's officially "unpredictable" as well (though I suspect better than wireless in that category).


Now, when you start talking about getting high performance out of the network I start to get real nervous. I would suspect you would be able to squeeze out performance comparable or somewhat better than the wireless performance that you tested out, but I wouldn't expect to be able to (eg.) stream video to both your PC and XBOX/TV at the same time from a NAS.

Given these issues, the answer in your case may be to use a hybrid system - run some devices on wireless, and some on powerline (and some on regular network cable if possible). As I mentioned, I expect performance on the EoP would be a bit better than wireless, but being shared it's probably just best to mix it up a bit. I would definitely plug the NAS into the router/AP box with a network cable as well to help get the best performance.

And with no offense meant to Aythrea, I think adding in other bridges or switches may unnecessarily complicate matters. None of the devices you listed sound like they're really going to talk to one another enough to really justify it IMO (excepting the NAS, but presumably you'll use that for the PC and XBOX, which are in different areas) and bridging wireless just halves throughput, which is not something you need.

[aythrea]

Xtreme CCIE... Cisco Certified Internet Engineer.

...Yeah. I think I've been outclassed. :P

And no. You didn't offend me. I was looking for a way to produce something similar to what he was looking for. If he can get the network service on his wireless N at his devices, then that's great. The goal was to minimize long running cables from point to point.

For every question there are multiple answers. Most of them are right. A few of them... simply are not. I think overall, we can agree that performance won't be had without actually hard wiring to a portion of your network. And using the Powerline devices is not going to be suitable, unfortunately.

[Soulburner]

Thanks guys.

Belkin is offering a device that claims to offer gigabit speeds over powerline ethernet. Unfortunately, the high cost of $150 is definitely not going to do it for me. I'll see what I can do with my cabling/wireless setup.

The other issue that I have is my apartment building is large. I am on the 3rd floor, and who knows how the place is wired. I don't know if my data will be traveling all over the place or just be confined to my apt only.

[Serra]

Thanks guys.

Belkin is offering a device that claims to offer gigabit speeds over powerline ethernet. Unfortunately, the high cost of $150 is definitely not going to do it for me. I'll see what I can do with my cabling/wireless setup.

The other issue that I have is my apartment building is large. I am on the 3rd floor, and who knows how the place is wired. I don't know if my data will be traveling all over the place or just be confined to my apt only.

Gig on EoP? Hmmm. I don't think it will be to "standard", but "standard" for EoP is a loosely defined term right now so I guess that's OK. Looking up the manual for their offering, I would say:
- They claim 1000Mb/s "ideal physical data rate". I can't say what they mean for sure, but a number of EoP products list a physical data rate and an actual throughput number lower, stating the difference is due to signaling overhead. Again, can't say for sure if that's the case, but worst-case scenario should be that it's MAX speed is 800Mb/s (~80% of physical max)
- They claim 1000Mb/s is 5x faster than current 100Mb/s offerings. This tells me that it's definitely not bi-directional (eg. regular gig networks are 1,000Mb/s in both directions simultaneously, not that consumer devices ever reach that throughput)
- AES encryption is available with these adapters, so I wouldn't worry about your neighbors seeing your traffic


Overall, I say it's probably worth giving it a test run. Even saying that you can hope for a bit over 200Mb/s (hopefully a conservative estimate) still pegs it as being better than wireless. To be conservative I might start out with just 1 set and see what kind of speeds you can get and re-evaluate whether it's worth migrating another link onto it (keeping in mind that it is a shared medium). It looks like it's a bother to change/sync the password on even two of them (and worse with 3/4+), but I imagine you can deal with it.

Xtreme CCIE... Cisco Certified Internet Engineer.

...Yeah. I think I've been outclassed. :P

Don't let the designation fool you, two of the best network guys I've personally known couldn't get their CCIE's and one of the worst engineers I knew did have it. I'm not saying it's worthless as a gauge, but let's just say it's not the full story

[Soulburner]

I don't care much about the link speed but the actual throughput. My 802.11n network says 130Mbps but I'll never push that much through it. That's what, 16MB/s? I'd love that but in my own testing I only manage 7-8MB/s unencrypted and 4.5MB/s encrypted from the wireless laptop to the wired PC. Between wired PCs the best I have ever seen is around 10MB/s (though, in 100Mbps mode). Sure, maybe the fact that my NICs are onboard have something to do with it, but surely I could do better than that.

It's very hard to find actual results out there for these Powerline/HomePlug etc devices, and I'd hate to be the guinea pig.

Anyway my NAS will be able to do 60-70MB/s and I need to get this network capable of that. I don't necessarily need that kind of speed, but anything is better than what I have going right now. Save for the Gigabit claims from Belkin, it doesn't look like this Powerline stuff would get me there.

I am redoing my system soon, and the changes that should enable these speeds are:

New Cat 5e or Cat 6a cables from Monoprice
Making sure my autonegotiation/1000 full duplex are set correct
Possibly a PCI-E NIC, but we'll see if that's necessary later
Windows 7, which (like Vista) has better network handling than XP