Homeplugs: Network speed being throttled by power usage?

[alexjholland]

Hey, we have a home network that starts with a Linksys wireless router in our hallway.

Whilst I enjoy having a fat piece of cat 5 cable that runs down to my bedroom under the floorboards with gigabit hardware the entire way, sadly this was not possible for our TV room upstairs.

After establishing that even a top-of-the-range Linksys router and wireless card with much channel tweaking couldn't produce acceptable results for our PC upstairs, we bought some fairly cheap Solwise home plugs.

The initial reaction was 'great', however over time (and, it now seems) a lot of media hardware added, the performance has dropped and now iPlayer on the XBox 360 and PC in that room is unusable.

I decided to get to the bottom of things by plugging in a laptop with cat 5 at every point, to find out where things were going wrong:

- The connection straight out of the back of our hallway router was 3mb. Now this isn't as good as the 6mb we were on until recently (and I'll call BT) but should still allow basic streaming.

- The reading from the Homeplug upstairs was a measly half Mb, clearly not enough for streaming - but get this:

- When I turned off all the other devices sharing plugs up there (PC, plasma TV, speakers, XBox, BR Player and a few more) the connection jumped up to 3Mb.

So, it seems the power coming in on those plugs to other devices is somehow disrupting the Homeplug's signal

Naturally the Homeplug enjoys its own plug - but we only have four plugs to share amongst perhaps twelve devices, so have a couple of big six-way splitters.

Is this interference known?

Is there any way round this? Would a different model of home plug perform better?

 

[alexjholland]

The Homeplug is on its own socket, but its a double socket next to a double socket and the other three all have stuff.

Right, we're on 85mbps and they do seem pretty useless. Browsing's ok, but not even streaming from my XBox works!

Cat 5 is a no-no, it's a whole different section of the house away (it's in two wings).

Looks like some 200mbps connectors it is then! I presume I'll need gigabit router then as well? (no point have 100mbps bottleneck!)

 

[alexjholland]

Naturally, I've tried each socket and they varied each time, but similarly. And all of them were better when I turned off other devices.

So is anyone going to recommend me a cost-reasonable upgrade?

 

[alexjholland]

Cat 5 is not an option. There is no attic in the hallway - not gonna happen!

Bearing in mind home plugs have dropped in price, I think we can get a couple of filtered extensions (are the basic Belkin Surgemasters filtered?) and a set of decent home plugs..

 

[alexjholland]

No, my room is even further away!