Homeplugs v Cable

ringo747

ringo747

ringo747

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1 Feb 2006
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I have moved into a newly built house and recently got Infinity installed. The routers are all downstairs and all my gear is upstairs.

Laptops connect via wireless at a good speed but I want to have a wired connection between PCs and a NAS box. I have a cheap Netgear switch that will do the job.

The big question is how should I get my upstairs PCs connected to the internet. They don't have wireless adapters and I want to make the full use of the GB switch by having the machines upstairs all wired.

Installing cable would be a royal pain in the backside but it is probably do-able. The BT guy suggested homeplugs. Would these limit the internet speeds that I would get?

Ideally I will wire all my PCs/laptops upstairs into the Netgear switch and all I will need is some link between the switch and the router downstairs. If I am getting 40Mb down on Infinity will I still be able to maximise this speed?

I think if I was having other PCs downstairs it would be a different story as it would be hard to get Gigabit LAN speeds but as they are all 'self-contained' in one room it should be fine. Correct?
 
from what i've seen it can be mixed, some seem to do really well with them and others not so good.

depends on the quality of the electrics, new house should be decent enough, but your not really going to know until you test :(.
 
If you get a very good connection with infinity, unless you get the newest 500/1000 models you might well be limited, as even the AV200 models only tend to push 1.5-8MBps, especially over multiple ring mains. The newest ones are starting to look like they might be suitable for HD streaming but cable is still much faster.
 
I've used homeplugs in the past and I too have found them problematic but very convenient.

On the flip side though both my recent experiences with homeplugs have been very positive! To me it genuinely seems that in the last 12 months reliability and speed of homeplugs have greatly improved.

We're also in a very fortunate situation where there doesn't seem to be much in the way of overpriced "monster cable" rip-offs out there so you can pretty much expect to get what you pay for and when you go top of the range it isn't actually that expensive - £60 for a pair of 200Mbs seems to be the most you can spend.

This said as others have pointed out, the limiting factor is your underlying power line cabling. In an old home it might be next to impossible to get a good connection but in my friends new build the homeplugs he got with his BT Vision box work a treat.

As I suggested to my friends though. Buy them, try it out and if they don't work for you then sell them on :)
 
my 200mbps homeplugs reach about 60mbps in reality (reading around this isnt a-typical)
60mps is good for about 7.5 MB/s transfer rate, enough for h264 hd stuff, but not raw hd.
 
Higher bitrate BD rips can hit 15-20MBps or more soo yeah. The higher specced homeplug are capable of about doubling the AV200 specced kits from my reading. The AV500 spec is brand new though so they might get better with time.
 
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Thanks guys. Might look at the new AV500s and if they aren't great then sell them on. Would be interested to hear other experiences about how limiting they are on a good internet connection.
 
I've got 2 homeplugs that are 200mpb/s and in my bungalow with 1 ring main, not individual floors like most newer builds they can stream 1080p HD from PC to wireless no probs.

I've used some in my old house which had 3 ring mains over 2 floors, kitchen and dining room, rest of ground floor and first floor struggled to get 40mpb between connections. I think they're more dependant on how many breakers they need to traverse across.

I've often run cat5e external grade cable outside of buildings to link floors together to save going internally. I'd say it all depends on what you want to do and how much your going to transfer over it. If it's streaming you should be ok
 
If I am streaming I will be streaming from the NAS to PCs via the Gb switch so really all the homeplugs part will do is give me an internet connection. Obviously I will want to max my downloading, iplayer, livetv on all the boxes so hopefully the internet speed would still stay around 37Mbps.
 
Homeplugs are good but you cant beat a good cat 6 cable.

I use 200Mbps powerplugs and they worked fine with Virgins 50 Mbps and gave consistent speed. However copying files to a NAS box they maxed out around 65Mbps. BTW, all "200Mbps" powerlines only have 100 Mbps ethernet ports on them.
 
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