Wi-Fi sucks. Well, it sucks if your router is lurking in a subterranean realm of your apartment and your gaming rig is located aboveground with an iron staircase in between the two and you don’t want to run 100m of cable or wire the apartment with ethernet because you don’t own the building.
Like Aus Post, I don’t want my express deliveries to be late when they arrive at somebody’s door. Except by special delivery, I mean sniper bullet. And door, I mean grill. And by grill, I mean face. You know, in Battlefield 3. Wi-Fi isn’t cutting it. The latency from a relay would be lethal (to me). And ethernet is an impossibility. So what I need is the fastest powerline networking setup money can buy.
If you’re not familiar, the concept of powerline networking is pretty amazing: It turns your home’s electrical wiring into a ready-made network. Ethernet cables sprout from power sockets like Matrix-y beanstalks. The cooler reality of powerline networking: It’s never remotely as fast as the label says it is, and you need newer wiring in your house for it to work well. But it’s been getting faster every year, and this year’s newerish 500Mb/s models are finally just fast enough, particularly for the dreary corners of your home that Wi-Fi simply won’t touch.
Netgear’s Powerline AV+ 500 is one of the fastest kits — if not the fastest — delivering a solid 100Mb/s or so in speed tests. It’s around $150.
It’s probably the nerdiest thing I’ve ever desired. (Barring a once hotly-desired pair of Power Rangers suspenders.) And it’s not even for a good, human reason, like streaming a girl’s favourite episode of How I Met Your Mother in HD to watch on my TV.
No, I just really like shooting people in the face across vast distances of terrain, imagining their shock and terror and aggravation, their tiny digital lives suddenly shattered from afar, sending them back to spawn to contemplate the meaning of their seven-second mini-existence. Maybe they were aiming at a friendly tank or fighter jet. Maybe they were sipping on some tea, like I do when I’m scanning for heads to pop. Now they’re just waiting to spawn, which is kind of weird if you think about it. [Netgear]
DarthDVD
Tuesday, December 27, 2011 at 3:10 PMshame they dont work though UPS’s.
Antonia
Tuesday, December 27, 2011 at 3:20 PMA house usually has a number of separate power circuits. Does powerline require both adapters to be on the same circuit?
Jamie
Wednesday, December 28, 2011 at 9:00 AMNo. They don’t even have to be in the same house!
/end flame
soundasleep
Tuesday, December 27, 2011 at 4:07 PMThey do need to be on the same circuit. They also don’t work very well (if at all) when used on a power board. They really need their own dedicated power socket. Worst case scenario a cheap “triangle” double adapter will work with only a minor speed hit. They have their own lightening production so no real need to worry about the fact they aren’t running via a surge board.
Ben
Tuesday, December 27, 2011 at 8:17 PMThey don’t need to be on the same circuit but will generally work faster if they are. Apparently the type of circuit breakers in your switchboard can make a difference but works fine for me with three (was four but I bricked one) across two circuits serving media to xbmc in the bedroom and to an airport express at the back of the house to extend wireless and feed AirTunes to an old stereo. These are the older 200mbs ones too.
aumelle
Tuesday, December 27, 2011 at 9:47 PMThey don’t need their own dedicated power socket, I’ve got mine plugged into a power strip – works fine at the exact same speed that comes from my router (twice the speed of wifi).
soundasleep
Wednesday, December 28, 2011 at 11:27 PMAs long as the power strip has nothing more than overload protection you’ll be fine (as you found). If its got any sort of surge protection or line filtering, then it won’t work.
Interesting about the different circuits. It must have something to do with the way the meterbox is wired. Im no electrician but I’d hazard a guess that some have filtering across circuits and some don’t. One thing that won’t work is across phases if you have 3 phase power…
Chris
Tuesday, December 27, 2011 at 4:44 PMThe quality of the wiring in your house has a major impact. I rent in a 60 odd year old house and the wiring is very iffy. I use an older model of these, but mine have the advantage in that they have a power outlet built into the unit, so I can use them as a pass through by plugging it into the wall socket, and then plu a power board into the unit to power more devices.
Mine run about 80 Mb/s. Good enough for online gaming on the rare occasions I do it, good enough to stream videos from my home server, but it does struggle streaming BluRay rips.
There is also a new model that acts as a wireless access point as well, which I think is very cool.
Jaezass
Tuesday, December 27, 2011 at 5:27 PMGood luck fitting that thing into a double socket plug, if you have something in the other socket! Unless of course you use a double adapter, one of those side by side left, right deals. But as Soundasleep says you will probably take a speed hit and if you live in an old house like me, you’ll have Buckleys chance. So pretty much a waste of money then eh? Oh well back to running Cat6 under the house. Do they make a router with 5 Ethernet plugs yet?
aumelle
Tuesday, December 27, 2011 at 9:52 PMYou can get a Netcomm NP204 with AC pass through that looks a nicer and fit wall plugs rather well – Foxtel sell them for $80 at their kiosks (eg at Westfield shopping).
olearymo
Wednesday, December 28, 2011 at 9:18 AMwhoever invented those side by side, right left things, I want to buy them a drink. Genius.
Damonii Ayreborn
Saturday, December 31, 2011 at 12:29 PMReally? a router with 5 ports? I have a whole stack of old cisco routers with 64 ports gathering dust because they are useless atm. ofcourse you can get routers with a ton of ports.
Daniel
Tuesday, December 27, 2011 at 9:26 PMI have a net gear av one and its amazingly fast. Can stream 3d HD movies from my laptop to the tv with no jumps. Also the net gear one has a little led on the front that lets you know the quality of the line. so you just move it till it turns green for the best results. Would definitely recommend if upgrading to wireless N is too pricey.
Grayda
Wednesday, December 28, 2011 at 1:23 PMWall wart alert! Arooooga!
EoP is a great idea (especially for renters) but why can’t they have a box on the floor like laptop chargers? I like having my TV AND my PS3 plugged in at the same time without having to buy a second power strip / passthrough device / whatever.
Daniel
Wednesday, December 28, 2011 at 2:20 PMThey do, The thing in the picture is just the sender pictured twice. The reciver is a little box like a router with just a cord going to the wall with a small plug on the end. Netgear already thought of this.
Oleg
Wednesday, December 28, 2011 at 4:01 PMThis is my Christmas present :)
soundasleep
Wednesday, December 28, 2011 at 11:30 PMI use the WD LiveWire myself and the previous comment about the quality of your electrical wiring being the major factor is 100%
My parents place is only about 10 years old and they get the full 8Mb/sec while my place was built in the 60′s and I only get around 2-3Mb/sec.
Greg
Wednesday, December 28, 2011 at 11:32 PMEoP is a joke. How hard is it to run some cat5e cable thru the ceiling or under the floor? Best few hours ever spent after moving house. Doesn’t matter if you’re renting, just do the job properly and you have nothing to worry about.
Jonathan
Thursday, December 29, 2011 at 10:20 AMI’m living in an apartment with concrete walls & ceiling, with a floating floor on top of another slab. The ceiling was rendered by the previous owner, so placing a conduit along the ceiling for a cable won’t sit well, and will be difficult to install anyway.
I totally agree, running cat5e cables is the best option. But when that isn’t a cost/aesthetics viable option, then people need to look at other solutions.
I’m just glad that not everybody thinks that EoP is a joke and that once there is a “best” technical solution, there is no longer a need to look at other use cases.
Emma
Thursday, December 29, 2011 at 2:43 AMI live in Britain and I have BT as my Internet Provider and to watch Vision TV I require powerline adapters because connecting my tv in the downstairs to my computer upstars with an ethernet cable would cause a lot of accidents! One thing I know about powerline adapters – they work faster and better if they are plugged in a wall socket not an extension lead.