Would a gigabit switch increase homeplug speeds? Plex issue

Richeh

Richeh

Richeh

Soldato
Joined
24 Jul 2003
Posts
3,394
Location
South East Coast
Hello,
I bought my mum an i3 NUC with a 1TB hard drive to run as a plex server to stream to her Samsung TV in her bedroom and to the main TV in the lounge. The Sky hub and NUC are in the lounge (currently no TV there yet as just moved in) with a homeplug there and then the receiving one in her bedroom around the other side of the flat which is quite a distance.

I've fiddled with settings but she still gets random pauses during playback, I have now set it to transcode as it happens less but still does. As the sky hub is plugged directly into the homeplug it is only 100mb local connection and i'm thinking by the time it gets through the 3-4 rooms or more to her bedroom the speed has dropped off big time.

I'm not an expert on homeplugs and networking so have a simple question. Would using a gigabit switch for Sky Hub>Switch>Homeplug allow higher speeds as 1000mb so the drop off would still leave plenty of speed OR is the fact that it 'appears' a 100MB connection slows right down by the time it gets there that adding a faster connection would make no difference?

Any help appeciated.
 
Odds are the connection between the homeplugs is running at less than 100Mbps, probably a lot less. Adding a switch as you describe will make no difference.
 
What speed/model powerline adapters are they? The switch likely won't make a difference but using faster powerline adapters might. It's all dependent on the electrical wiring etc though really.
 
The bottleneck will be the homeplugs in this setup, either replace with better ones with netter rated speed (you still may run in to similar situations if there is wiring interference or general loss) if there is really no other option then Ethernet would resolve.

You shouldn't have issues like that unless there is major signal degrading issues, I stream from Plex running on a windows server VM at my old house, over the internet (VPN) to the house I'm living in now, this house only has a 3.7mb ADSL connection shared with a house of 4 people and I have no issues with pauses, maybe one at the beginning of the film.
 
Try a "real world" test. Get iPerf on the NUC and set it as a server and then connect to the home plug the other end and test it off the NUC.

Will give an accurate throughput between the "end device" and the NUC through the homeplugs.
 
Run the home plug app to see what speeds they are connecting to each other at. I have the same ones and through an old house they connect at way over the 100mbps Ethernet they have so are running at full speed.
 
Additionally like I say the Ethernet port on them is 100 so a gigabit switch will be pointless. You can get ones with 1gbps ports but see what they connect at first.
 
I would honestly just run some cat5e, I'm not a fan of wifi or power line converters so when I rewired my house I ran cat5 litterally everywhere.
I rented a few flats before buying my place and I surface ran cat5 in all of them, can be neat enough if you do the job carefully :)
 
I always try to put two runs in when I'm laying in cable,you never know when you might want that second run.

Can't beat a bit of redundancy.
 
You really need to get the diagnostic program for your plugs to see how well they are running, the state of wiring can make a massive difference. If you can't/won't do that then test the set-up with cat5e replacing the home plugs, it may be easier to move things closer for this as it'll save the need to get a long cable.

I'm with dtokez on the cat5 though, I made the mistake of only putting in two feeds early on to the bedroom thinking i'd just use local streaming from the servers and have a spare feed. That lasted until I was asked to pipe Sky upstairs and suddenly the hdmi balun's needed two feeds as well as a network feed and the RG6 for the remote which could all easily have been run at the same time with a little forward planning.
 
I have the AV500+ kit from TP-Link and I am getting a connection speed of 290mb/s and this is in an old house with 20+ year old wiring. It was renewed but a long time ago. Also the distance of the connection is at least 50m of copper wire. I have no issues streaming 1080p from my plex server on my home server to a laptop or xbox 360.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom