Related: anybody have experience with powerline ethernet? Are there good adapters that can make high-quality/high-speed ethernet connections over power wiring inside a home? I know these are a thing but I have no idea how good their quality is or how strongly they depend on the wire itself.
In my first flat I had around 400mbit/s via some cheap powerline adapter, in my second flat I couldn't connect them at all...
You'll just have to try, it depends a lot on your home wiring and can be interfered by so many things. But if it works it's definitely nicer and more stable than WiFi.
I have the Extollo LANPlug 2000 and it has by far the best performance (rock solid pings of about 3ms in my house), but:
1. It works terribly if you use more than 2. There's just some bug in the L2 switching where it will get confused about the destination; broadcast packets get through, but some packets to specific hosts don't go through. Rebooting the adapter fixes it temporarily. I ended up moving one device to WiFi and as a pair it works reliably
2. The firmware it ships with is a bit limited, but they provided me with something more configurable when I contacted support about issue #1
The more advanced firmware they sent me allows tuning what broadcast traffic is allowed through. Note that with either firmware, broadcast traffic worked fine, but it would just seem to get confused about where a specific MAC was.
PowerLine uses very similar technology as WiFi does, except that power cables are significantly more noisy than air. As such, they usually perform significantly worse than wifi. With exception of certain cases like buildings with 19th century 2m thick walls.
In most other cases, quality WiFi equipment performed better and was more stable.
This has been my experience. I bought some Devolo powerline adapters a few years ago to try in my apartment, and got quite poor speed (<100Mbps) and network was rather unstable. Switched to WiFi and got better speed and stability.
Last year I moved to a new place and faced the same issue of wanting internet in a different room and tried the Devolos again. Same experience except worse speed. Again I had to fall back to WiFi, which at least gets me ~150Mbps here.
That depends on where you are. In a drywall or wooden house, this would be true, but in concrete apartment building with thick walls and many other networks, it might not be the case.
Powerline depends a lot on the state of your power wiring.
I have Devolo Magic2 G.hn powerline adapters. In my rental UK apartment (1990 or so vintage), I can barely get 100 Mbps for the 10 meters or so from my office to the living room. The same units with mesh-wifi sync at around 300 Mbps in my parents' much larger 1980 vintage house in France. Perhaps the difference is due to the UK's crackpot ring electrical standard.
I wish someone would make laser free-space optics for in-home use (they are available for company campus networks).
WiFi 6E adds a full GHz of bandwidth in the 6GHz band and should dramatically improve congestion, but you will still need multiple access points with some form of wired backhaul to get reliable WiFi.
I have the TP-Link AV2000 and found them good. My office has a bunch of metal laundry appliances and concrete walls between my desk and the wifi router, so wifi signal is terrible there. Solved it with the AV2000.
I also tried using a mesh wifi network, and was able to bounce a signal around the dead zone and get a WiFi signal with a higher bandwidth than the powerline ethernet, but I still found I got a lot of glitches in video calls, so went back to the powerline ethernet.
I've not noticed the problems other commenters here had with their adapters with the AV2000.
I initially tried a cheaper powerline ethernet, and it was worse than WiFi, so I'd recommend you buy the most expensive/best one that you can afford.
My desktop is connected through DLink AV1200 PLCs.
Every once in a while they lose connection (maybe once a month).
The speed is not great (~300Mbps) but I don't care because my inet connection is only 100Mbps. The latency is better than wifi, and really consistent (unlike wifi):
--- 192.168.1.1 ping statistics ---
18 packets transmitted, 18 received, 0% packet loss, time 48ms
I have Devolo dLAN powerline adapters and they deliver around 300mbps even though they are marketed as “AV1200” and have Gigabit Ethernet ports.
So yes there are adapters that are decent, but you need to aim for the fastest ones because real-world performance seems to be 1/10th of the advertised performance.
I had a pair of tp link pa8010 gigabit adapters for a wire running about 10m. I had pairing issues every day, regular "random packet loss", large latency spikes to my router, none of which I was seeing on a wifi device. It was better than nothing, but not something I'd recommend.
And also stomp all over various HF radio bands. They're a nuisance.
Anything that converts long runs of unshielded cable into an incoherent broadband transmitting antenna should fail FCC certification, yet they're still on sale.
A run of ethernet cable costs money to install, but once done it uses no power, zero maintenance and gives you 1000Mbs or more full duplex reliably. (I'd discard Ethernet over Power before Wifi, cable is so much nicer).
All my walls are solid brick, so it's a choice of cabling tacked to skirting boards, cabling under the floors or excavations. I'd pick powerline over those options.
All my walls are solid concrete. I recently had the house cabled up because the powerline stuff dropped multiple times a day for 5 minutes at a time. It was infuriating.
The cabling runs through the ceiling and dropped down to port height via electrical conduit on the external side of the wall. It was expensive but I would have paid more considering the quality of life improvement.
I spent a couple of hundred on a mesh wifi system and while it has two downsides (double nat, and a higher base latency of around 6ms instead of <1ms to the router) it's otherwise flawless. I have a small flat (500 sq ft) and it took 3 carefully positioned mesh points (within LOS of each other) but it works great.
I've been using ethernet cables at home recently, on account of having a bunch of work stuff here. Ethernet = better, more consistent throughput.
So I've settled on using rubber cable floor covers. They don't look very good, but they're perfectly practical: cheap, much reduced trip risk, no need to open up the walls or tape/nail anything to them to get everything arranged.
(Not sure how I'd feel about this on a permanent basis, though. Once it's back to just me, my laptop, my iPad, and my phone, the internet connection will be the bottleneck again, and I'll be switching back to nothing but wifi...)
