The trouble with tribbles (or multiple powerline networking points)

T1berious

1st world problems...

We have a 3 floor Victorian house. It comes with all the things that any techie loathes (walls made of unobtainium and it's self generating force field that kills mobile phone signals quicker than a Cyberdyne model 101 in search of Sarah Connor ) but it has character...

Anyway, I've got a Netgear Nighthawk Router on the ground floor being fed via Virgin Broadband. No issues at all and very happy with the speeds.

Rather than list every item in every room I've done it by floor.

Ground Floor: 2 x AV amps, 1 x 4K OLED, 1 x Sonos Connect. Sonos Bridge
First floor: 2 Sonos Play 1
Second Floor: Lab with 2 x Cisco Switches, 4 x Micro Servers, 1 x NAS. Easy Room 1 x HTPC, HD LCD, Study 1 x Gaming PC, 1 x Sonos Connect. 1 x Sonos Boost

I previously had a mixture of powerline networking adapters. I've replaced them all with the same TPlink 1000 mbps units. I was hoping to do a hub and spoke network but this doesn't seemed to have worked out.

I extended the Wi Fi by using some old BT routers and a TPlink C3200 using them as WAP points. Wi Fi hasn't been too bad but the wired connections have been really hit and miss.

I guess I wanted to hear from other peeps here on their experiences and if a hub and spoke powerline network is even possible?

Cheers for any thoughts shared!

T1b

mickevh

HomePlug technology works with a "common bus" paradigm, no matter how you connect them or what you want to call the physical architecture. (Incidentally, Ethernet used to work this way back in pre-historic times before the ethernet switch got invented - Wi-Fi still does.) Maybe other brands work differently, but I tend to doubt it.

As such "only one plug at a time" can transmit (onto the mains) and all the rest have to listen. Who's "turn" it is to transmit is mediated by a designated "master" plug - I forget whether that's built into the hardware or whether there's some mechanism where the plugs "elect" a master.

Thusly, the more plugs you have, the more they need to transmit, the more competition there is for access to and control of the transmission medium (the mains circuit) and the "slower" (and possibly more erratic) the usage experience can be from any given endstation. Of course, this is all happening thousands of times a second.

Throw in some interference, poor signalling conditions, and the Half Duplex nature of the technology and so on and it all eats away at the available bandwidth.

At don't forget that the protocol overhead (useful user data throughput versus link rate) is high for HomePlugs - of the order of 45-55% is often cited. AIUI, most HomePlugs come with some kind of "cockpit" software/App the displays the basic link rates between any given pair of HomePlugs (which could all be different, and different in opposite directions.)

As ever, for fast, reliable, high capacity data networking, the best option is to get the drills out, install some UTP cable and build a "proper" ethenet LAN. For all their cleverness, powerline comms is reverse engineering something (the mains) that was never designed for data networking and will always be second best.

T1berious

Cheers for that,

I managed to get most of this working but bizarrely the Kitchen unit refused to pair. So I'm going to have to look at expanding the wireless to deal with short fall.

Thanks again for the info.