Powerline Adaptor or Wireless Adaptor?

[AsukaNii]

Title^^

[W-L]

Title^^

 

Powerline Adapter is better than wireless as long as the wiring in your home isn't very old.

[BallisticPeanut]

Powerline may or may not work depending on your house.  My house is about 20-25 years old and I get worse than wireless G speeds with powerline.  Decided to upgrade to 5ghz instead.

[CallMeDice]

Powerline Adapter is better than wireless as long as the wiring in your home isn't very old.

My house is built in 1962 and I get 19 mbps on ethernet, 18 mbps on powerline and 12 mbps on wifi (while sitting 3 meters from the router!) The pings are also 1, 3 and 12 in the same order. So in my case the wiring age doesn't make a lot of difference. 

[W-L]

My house is built in 1962 and I get 19 mbps on ethernet, 18 mbps on powerline and 12 mbps on wifi (while sitting 3 meters from the router!) The pings are also 1, 3 and 12 in the same order. So in my case the wiring age doesn't make a lot of difference. 

 

The wiring in your home was probably updated or the wiring had little effect in your case, there are some that have issues where knob and tube wiring are still in their homes which make for bad electrical connections to our standards theses days.

[CallMeDice]

The wiring in your home was probably updated or the wiring had little effect in your case, there are some that have issues where knob and tube wiring are still in their homes which make for bad electrical connections to our standards theses days.

I think it's because 20 mbps isn't much to handle for a 500 mbps powerline adaptor, but I think if I would upgrade my max bandwith, it would really suffer from the wire.

[Yamosu]

I have before used an old router with Tomato firmware installed to act as a wireless bridge. With the external antennas I found the wireless signal strength was better and I was able to share that over ethernet with the other devices in my room. Since then I have run an ethernet cable up here and I'm now fully wired into my network.

 

If you want to stick to wireless methods you could try a range extender but ideally for maximum bandwidth you'd be best trying to use ethernet if you can.

 

I'd also advise against powerline networking technology. It is known to cause intereference on shortwave and VHF radio frequency bands. If you live near an airport you could potentially be interfereing with ATC and whilst I can't speak for other countries OFCOM here in the UK would take a very dim view of that. I have seen evidence of powerline networking equipment functioning whilst not actually connected to the same ring main. In one example one plug was running off a generator and another off the mains. I would be very careful if you intend on going down the powerline route.

 

Perhaps it might just be me but there is no substitute for an ethernet cable!

[skywake]

I think it's because 20 mbps isn't much to handle for a 500 mbps powerline adaptor, but I think if I would upgrade my max bandwith, it would really suffer from the wire.

You shouldn't use an internet speedtest to measure the performance of LAN devices. The simple fact is that some people have pretty fast internet connections where powerline and WiFi can be bottlenecks. And even if they don't things like network storage and game streaming are fairly common especially amongst tech enthusiasts.

 

Anyways, this is what I posted about a week ago when this question was asked:

 

Additional latency (add this ontop of any connection):

Ethernet: <1ms

WiFi: 2ms average, range from 1ms to 100ms+

Powerline: 4ms average, range from 3ms to 50ms+

 

Bandwidth bottleneck (if your connection is faster than this, this is your new speed):

Wired 100Mbps: ~100Mbps

Wired Gigabit: ~1Gbps

Wireless N: 30-80Mbps

Wireless AC: 150-400Mbps

Powerline AV(200/500): 30-70Mbps

Powerline AV2(1200/2000): 100-200Mbps

[braneopbru]

Neither.

 

MoCA 2.0

 

http://www.actiontec.com/339.html

 

A little on the expensive side, but every review that I've read says the same thing; works perfectly; no downsides, other than price.

 

These connect through you television cabling in the walls. You put one at either end of a cable run. It mixes network traffic with your tv signal on one end and on the other end it'll split the tv and network signal again.

[skywake]

Neither. MoCA 2.0

The issue with those is that not everyone has Coax, I don't know about different regions but at the very least I know that in Australia it's virtually non-existent. And even if it is available it's not nessisarily between the two points which you want to connect. Unlike power sockets which are not only universal but are pretty much always near where you have your gear setup. So it's much easier just to suggest powerline. Also MoCA 2.0 sits at around 500Mbps real world performance from what I can gather. Which is awesome, but as things have improved those are speeds which are achievable with higher end WiFi and Powerline setups.

 

Of course if you want the best solution running Cat5/5e/6 is always going to be better.

[W-L]

Neither.

MoCA 2.0

http://www.actiontec.com/339.html

A little on the expensive side, but every review that I've read says the same thing; works perfectly; no downsides, other than price.

These connect through you television cabling in the walls. You put one at either end of a cable run. It mixes network traffic with your tv signal on one end and on the other end it'll split the tv and network signal again.

 

Hmm interesting product, didn't know one existed for coax, seems like a good idea with the large bandwidth capability for coax as long as it doesn't have problems with interference.