As an example, we know of a house where
the entire kitchen circuit – that also powers
the adjacent room where the telephone cable
enters the house – simply doesn’t connect to
the rest of the house when using powerline.
That’s despite separate ring mains also being
used throughout other areas of the house and
powerline working fine across them. The only
real way to tell if the technology will work for
you is to try it out.
The other major problem can be the quality
of your home’s power cabling, both in terms
of age and degradation, and how much
interference and noise is on the circuit due to
the appliances that are connected to it.
Certain appliances that put high loads on
the circuit – and particularly those that include
a motor or some other load that introduces
oscillations to the circuit, such as microwaves
or washing machines – can introduce
enough noise to degrade or totally disrupt the
powerline circuit. Some surge protectors can
block the signal too, so it often doesn’t work
over extension cables.
All that said, we’ve tested the technology
over many years and generally found it to
be very reliable. Moreover, in our testing, it
worked just fine over a 30m mains extension
reel with a surge protector, so again, it’s worth
seeing if you can borrow a kit off a friend if
they’re going away, giving it a go and seeing
if your home’s cabling setup will work well
with it.
When it came to our testing, we set up
one powerline plug in a wall socket next to
the router in the front room, then plugged
the second adaptor into a socket in the first
and second test locations, while using a
30m extension reel to reach the third test
location in the garden. We also tested two
different powerline products. An older AV600(600Mb/sec) product and a top-of-the-line
2,400Mb/sec system from Devolo, called the
Magic 2 LAN starter kit.
Starting with the older kit, we were actually
a little surprised to see a notably higher
ping in our first test location than any of the
Wi-Fi systems. Seemingly, the interference
and error management required by the
technology to overcome noise on the line is
enough to add a bit of delay when compared
with Wi-Fi at close range. However, the
average of 17ms and maximum of 21 is still
more than acceptable.
As for overall speed, we again see that peak
performance is nothing to write home about,
with a maximum rate of 157Mb/sec. That’s
still ample for most uses, but it’s still far behind
even older Wi-Fi standards.
Instead, it’s as we get further away
that powerline shows its talents. In both
our second and third test locations, the
technology delivered essentially identical
performance to the close-range test. There
was a bit of a speed-drop in location two,
suggesting the quality of the cabling betweenthe two locations isn’t all that great, but the
extension reel didn’t miss a beat. Plus, of
course, that signal was being carried the full
30m length of the reel, regardless of how
much it was extended, so you can expect to
get that sort of performance right to its end.
Where the tests became particularly
interesting with this technology was when
trying the new higher-speed version. We
saw peak throughput rise a little at test
location one, but it actually performed worse
at the other locations. Meanwhile, pings
were consistently high in all locations, with
averages of around 50ms and maximums of
nearly 80ms.
Of course, as we mentioned before, others’
mileage may vary here, depending on the
cabling in your home. However, there’s a
possibility that if the technology is relying on
a higher-frequency signal to transmit data
at a higher rate then it may suffer more from
noise on the line.
Either way, it’s testament to the limitations
and potential pitfalls of the technology.
Nonetheless, in our general experience,and as the testing for the AV600 powerline
kit showed, as long as the technology
works across the circuits in your house
then it generally delivers solid (if not
record-breaking) performance across
different ranges.Other alternatives
We’ve covered the main three or four options
open to most homes when it comes to
improving the network coverage of your
home. However, there are a few more options
we didn’t test.
For a start, there are technologies
that combine the best of both wired and
wireless networking by using Ethernet or
indeed powerline technology to connect
the major backbones of your network, then
using wireless access points to actually
connect your devices to the network in each
location. This general approach is called
wired backhauling (the backhaul being the
connection between networking products,
rather than between client devices and
the network).Devolo’s mesh Wi-Fi kit provides mesh Wi-Fi but with a wired backhaul via powerline networking
MICROWAVES OR WASHING MACHINES CAN
INTRODUCE ENOUGH NOISE TO DEGRADE OR
TOTALLY DISRUPT THE POWERLINE CIRCUITFEATURE / DEEP DIVE