Powerline adapters - pros and cons?

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I'm thinking of putting in a powerline adater to my games machine and/or the kids room from the main modem/router, but not sure if they're considered as good or not, and indeed, what to look for in them?

One of my main issues I think will be that I ned to use a power bank or multiplug at the modem end at least. I suspect this will mena it's not even worth considering?
 
Pros
None
(Well maybe that they are "easy" - but so is wifi, even if you have to resort to wifi meshes)

Cons
- Spend next few days wondering why bandwidth isn't as advertised on the box
- May not even work depending on house wiring (e.g. old house)
- Generally not as good as modern Wifi in terms of bandwidth
- Definitely not as good as Wired Ethernet in terms of bandwidth or latency
- Cost of adapters easily pays for cost of proper Ethernet cable
 
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Thanks for the reply... I had looked at possibly getting a mesh sorted out, but it looks expensive. Although I know it' not the same I've never had good results from a wifi-extender, and so had thought about going the wired route.
Running cable everywhere will not go down well with the interior boss of the housing department
 
They were good when WiFi was rubbish, but a decent WiFi setup is going to be better in most cases now. Not to say there aren't circumstances where powerline may be optimal, I used a 500mb set for years.

They can work fine with a multiplug. They are usually pass through though so no need for extra sockets.
 
Yup, they are rubbish.

If your house has satellite cabling you can get sat > ethernet boxes, which may be an alternate option to Wi-Fi or hardwiring. Again, if the house is reasonably new and has telephone sockets, they're usually wired with Cat5, so you could swap the faceplates out after figuring out where each socket is wired to.
 
Dont bother is my advice. I had nothing but trouble with mine, the first ones died and were replaced with a newer model and they were useless too.
 
Meh, they're fine. Not blazing fast but if you have a non gig fibre connection then work out if you'd even hit their limits.
For where WiFi won't work or you can't run cable they're a simple solution. I kind of get the hate for them but they serve a purpose.
 
thanks for the input folks - it's appreciated.
We have gigabit connection, and the Virgin Hub 5... maybe it would be bettter for us to look at a dedicated router, or maybe the mesh setup.
 
I use powerline to get a signal into a garage to connect a ring camera. Mine are quite stable, it'll depend on your wiring.

Mine are Deco P7's which use powerline in combination with wifi - so more reliable than just powerline alone.

Wouldn't use it for my gaming machine, way too slow.
 
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interesting! I haven;t been keeping up with it....I still use powerlines everywhere where I can for no reason other than habbit. All smart TVs, my gaming rig etc. My BB speeds are poor anyway living in the sticks but they are super reliable IMO. That said, I'm going to be running some speed tests this afternoon to see if I should enable WIFI instead on all my devices!
 
If you have a gigabit connection you'll definitely be disappointed. I used powerline adapters up until the start of this year on my old connection, but that was 35Mbps max FTTC. FTTP Finally became available this year and after upgrading I had to stop using them for my PC because it just gutted speeds. Could only get 100Mbps on a 900Mbps connection. Ended up swapping to MoCA instead since we already had some un-used aerial cables wired between the two rooms, much better than powerline, I get the full 940Mbps speed.

I do still make use of the powerline adapters, but it's only for the Sky Q Mini box now as for some bizarre reason they don't like being on a different ethernet switch to the main Sky Q box. So powerline is the only easy way to do that, plus the speed is more than enough for that purpose.
 
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What I find with powerline, is they tend to be more consistent. This can mean less susceptible to interference and or loading. They are a life-saver in situations where Wi-Fi is difficult. Having said that, these days I just find a way to route an Ethernet cable, it's usually less trouble doing that, and you only have to do it once and job done. All other solutions may need tweaking.
 
I wouldn't expect people to give you a 100% accurate view, as for me reason, people tend to just decide they either love or hate using them, with nothing in between. Also, they have a bad reputation in general, due to their ability to leak energy and potentially affect other devices.

I used them for 10+ years and in my house, they always worked much better than wifi (early wifi technologies barely worked at all in my room, but improved somewhat over time), needing only occasional resets and were almost plug and play. I would say that the reliability tends to be a bit better when using fewer homeplugs /nodes, we still use some because reasons (the others didn't want the disruption of upgrading their wiring in their rooms).

Wifi deserves it's reputation for terrible reliability and poor /inconsistent bandwidth, and this has generally only got worse as more households have adopted it. Homeplugs for many will provide a much more reliable and steady experience, and this is true for several places I've tried them. They are generally a more secure system as well.

I might as well say it, ethernet/ wired is always better, but not always practical. You can't go wrong once it has been set up. Homeplugs are obviously a more portable setup, it's very quick and simple.

Edit - I'd just like to echo someone else's point, I think they are limited in bandwidth (throughput) to around 50-100mbps, so ethernet is always a better option for this reason, but it's certainly fast enough for typical internet usage.
 
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I wouldn't expect people to give you a 100% accurate view, as for me reason, people tend to just decide they either love or hate using them, with nothing in between. Also, they have a bad reputation in general, due to their ability to leak energy and potentially effect other devices.

I used them for 10+ years and in my house, they always worked much better than wifi (early wifi technologies barely worked at all in my room, but improved somewhat over time), needing only occasional resets and were almost plug and play. I would say that the reliability tends to be a bit better when using fewer homeplugs /nodes, we still use some because reasons (the others didn't want the disruption of upgrading their wiring in their rooms).

Wifi deserves it's reputation for terrible reliability, and this has generally only got worse as more households have adopted it. Homeplugs for many will provide a much more reliable and steady experience, and this is true for several places I've tried them. They are generally a more secure system as well.

I might as well say it, ethernet/ wired is always better, but not always practical. You can't go wrong once it has been set up.
I mean it also depends on what your goal actually is, and what your situation is.

WiFI is generally going to be better for pure speed these days without a doubt, unless your router is in a really awkward spot and your device is the other side of the house. There is exceptions, where your powerline isn't having to transmit across longish distances or through multiple circuits, in which case you might get similar speeds, but I don't know many people who managed to get that.

Powerline is generally more consistent if you're playing fighting games or something where you don't want jitter/packet loss/latency etc. However, there is exceptions for this too. If you have some particularly old lines, its travelling a long route, and/or if you've got a lot of other things on the circuit (ie large appliances that might get turned on) then it can actually be less consistent than WiFI in some scenarios.

For what its worth, while I think powerline adapters can some times get a overly harsh rep (ie some people saying not to use them at all, when there is some scenarios where it makes sense), I also think WiFI is sometimes unfairly treated too. While I admit a lot of the average public might not have the best WiFi due to various reasons, like poor ISP routers, poor set up or whatever. You can also get WiFI to be pretty consistent and high speed too with the right set up. Neither is ever going to be as good as ethernet, but as you say it's not always practical so it's about doing what you can with the means which you can.
 
Wifi generally only provides good bandwidth at short ranges if going through walls and is still quite expensive for a decent + modern setup. You can try to tweak it for months/years and only get a relatively small improvement. There are so many things that can interfere with WIFi and troubleshooting it is often futile, I would say that homeplugs are always worth a try for the potential time saved, just take them back if you happen to be one of the unlucky ones where they don't work well.

I use some Wifi, but mostly to just connect mobile devices /tablets at shorter ranges. It can work well in combination with a mostly wired network.

There are some new types of powerline I haven't tried, that use a different spec called G.hn. I can't comment on how well these work, but the bandwidth is supposedly improved on the latest devices. My advice would be to disable power saving on any powerline devices you use, if they have this feature.

As a sidenote - How many ISPs have suffered at the hands of WIFI, and the significant number of people who (still) cannot differentiate between WIFI bandwidth and internet connection speed bandwidth :cry:
 
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