Kitz Forum

Broadband Related => Broadband Hardware => Topic started by: jid on September 17, 2015, 12:04:53 AM

Title: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: jid on September 17, 2015, 12:04:53 AM
Bought some new Tp Link homeplugs the other day and got to install them. All seemed good on the stats no problems however earlier I updated both ipads using the WiFi access point connected to the homeplug network.

The results were quite disastrous throughout the day! Removed the rogue new one and all is now hopefully back to normal!
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: mcfluffy on September 18, 2015, 09:42:43 AM
I used to have a homeplug network in my old house. I know they say you shouldn't use them on separate ring circuits but I didn't have much choice, so I wasn't hopeful it'd be any good but I was surprised to find they connected well and I'd get around 60mbps speed.

But, over time (about a year) they degraded in connection speed and quality to the point where they barely worked. Nothing really changed with the electricity usage in the house either and the homeplugs seemed to connect find if they were close together so I never did get to the bottom of why they worked really well to begin with but slowly degraded to the point of uselessness.

They were D-Link's homeplugs, I've always found D-Link tend to make good hardware (maybe I'm wrong about that though, I must admit I haven't used much of their stuff over the years but what I have used still works fine, except for these plugs which I've since thrown away).
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: michty_me on September 21, 2015, 02:46:07 PM
Last time I tried homeplugs, My connection deteriorated by 35Mb in the space of two days. As soon as they were removed, Improvements came back and got back to normal after a week.

The ones I tried were the Solwise 1200AV models. Never tried any more since as I don't want to upset DLM using them.
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: Weaver on September 25, 2015, 01:14:13 AM
But when you think about it, it's a device designed to cause mains interface and lots of it. What a supremely bad idea, what could possibly go wrong. Shudders. :o
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: michty_me on September 25, 2015, 09:33:10 AM
Very true.
I get better reliability out of my Asus wireless AC card so stuck with that.
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: burakkucat on September 25, 2015, 05:28:49 PM
What a supremely bad idea, what could possibly go wrong. Shudders. :o

When I first read about such devices, way back when, my first thought was "Is it April the first?" and my second thought was "This is borderline lunacy".  :-X
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: NewtronStar on September 25, 2015, 05:47:27 PM
Have set of TP-Link AV's they were supposed to be put into are recycle bin but thought some day in the future they won't screw up the stats.

I'll stick one in the power socket at 8pm this evening for 10 minutes :scare: and watch the stats and if anyone is interested they can view it on MDWS in realtime  ;)
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: AArdvark on September 25, 2015, 06:27:16 PM
Putting on my 'Canute' head  ;D:

I have used them and they have been useful in certain circumstances.
I have not observed any of the problems listed but appreciate the general consensus is a negative one.
They can be useful so I have not thrown them away.
[Tin hat on mode]
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: NewtronStar on September 25, 2015, 08:46:50 PM
Homeplug installed at 8pm you will notice the FEC counts have increased and those errors are now at a constant 3500 + fec per min, it's difficult to compare this line which had problems with homeplugs when using the old interleaved profile you would have seen upto 250,000 + fec's per min.

Now this line has G.INP enabled the FEC count seems to be very much lower when using homeplugs this has surprised me  :o
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: michty_me on September 25, 2015, 08:57:06 PM
Still, it shows what they do.
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: NewtronStar on September 25, 2015, 09:06:35 PM
Still, it shows what they do.

Indeed it's now been removed from the power socket  :)
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: michty_me on September 25, 2015, 09:11:55 PM
I knew they caused noise but that just shows how much. I've seen first hand what they done to my connection but thought I would try them as a friend swore by them. At least I tried and found out first hand, I tend to try things anyway to see for myself no matter how good or bad feedback is.
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: broadstairs on September 25, 2015, 09:50:30 PM
I'd love to see FEC counts as low as that shown during your test and I dont have homeplugs installed. See broadstair on MDWS.

Stuart
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: burakkucat on September 25, 2015, 09:53:22 PM
Homeplug installed at 8pm you will notice the FEC counts have increased and those errors are now at a constant 3500 + fec per min, it's difficult to compare this line which had problems with homeplugs when using the old interleaved profile you would have seen upto 250,000 + fec's per min.

Now this line has G.INP enabled the FEC count seems to be very much lower when using homeplugs this has surprised me  :o

Just a quick request for clarification of the experiment, please.

Did you install just one or a pair of Homeplugs? If a pair, were you passing data over the link?  :-\
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: NewtronStar on September 25, 2015, 11:16:55 PM

Just a quick request for clarification of the experiment, please.

Did you install just one or a pair of Homeplugs? If a pair, were you passing data over the link?  :-\

Just intalled one of the pairs with a cat5 from router to it, but i don't need to that because as soon as one homeplug device is inserted into the mains things start to happen.
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: burakkucat on September 25, 2015, 11:21:14 PM
Just intalled one of the pairs with a cat5 from router to it, but i don't need to that because as soon as one homeplug device is inserted into the mains things start to happen.

Thank you for that clarification.
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: NewtronStar on September 25, 2015, 11:52:30 PM
I'd love to see FEC counts as low as that shown during your test and I dont have homeplugs installed. See broadstair on MDWS.

Stuart

There is nothing wrong with your FEC's it's up and down spikes the worry would be if was at a constant level of FEC's and if you look at Ronski's FEC's at 280,000 that's what this line had with homeplugs on interleaved though Ronski FEC's has dropped from 290,000 to 21858 since 8am  :thumbs:
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: michty_me on September 26, 2015, 12:18:04 AM
Good point burakkucat, Do homeplugs not ramp up interference once data is passing between? I seem to remember reading that if more data is passing through the link, The more interference they cause.
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: burakkucat on September 26, 2015, 01:25:06 AM
Hmm . . . I would not go as far as saying that Homeplugs cause interference. Some makes are just more sensitive to the incredibly harsh environment in which they are being operated.

Being a scientist and techno-kitteh, I was interested to know the exact conditions under which N*Star's experiment was conducted.  :)
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: Weaver on September 26, 2015, 03:22:17 AM
I'd be interested to find out what a pair of these devices does to your neighbour's mains and to their DSL.
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: broadstairs on September 26, 2015, 08:19:35 AM
I'd be interested to find out what a pair of these devices does to your neighbour's mains and to their DSL.

I guess the problem with that would be knowing which pahse your house is on and who of your neighbours is on the same phase.

Stuart
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: freelander on September 26, 2015, 09:47:05 AM
I use tp-link home plugs in my set up,

 my set up is a desktop pc with my billion 8800nl sat on top this is next to a double socket with a tp-link him plug in one socket and a tacima 6 way mains conditioner plugged in the other socket, all my cables have ferrite magnets clipped to them , All my power adapters for 2 printers ,router and a desk light and my pc power supply are plugged in to the tacima , I have another home plug in my front room that my smart tv ,fire tv box and a Vu solo2 box are plugged into

I removed  my home plug and monitored for a few hours and then replaced and there was no difference in errors recorded , I have 0 FEC errors , about 30 ES and  about 650 CEC an hour reported by DSL stats,  it may be the tacima is doing something  or the magnets

This is the tacima  I bought
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tacima-6-Way-Mains-Conditioner-Protection/dp/B00UB0G4DQ/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1443256261&sr=8-2&keywords=tacima+cs929
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: AArdvark on September 26, 2015, 12:11:56 PM
@Freelander

Thank you!!
Someone else who has had no problems with Homeplugs...... :yay:
Thought is was not just me.  :D :D
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: guest on September 26, 2015, 03:15:18 PM
Ring mains networking is the spawn of the devil. End of.
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: AArdvark on September 26, 2015, 03:54:46 PM
Ring mains networking is the spawn of the devil. End of.
:lol:
Visions of a man with a Sandwich board ...... <jk> 
:lol:

I know all the minus points but it has not been negative when I have had to use them.
Of course prefer a nice Gigabit network but sometimes you are in a fix and need a solution to work round the lack of a network.
Wi-Fi is not 100% reliable and is impacted by whatever your neighbours are doing if they start overlaping your channel etc.
I have at least 20 other wi-fi connections from near neighbours that I can see with no effort.
They are all tripping over each other.
Luckily there are NO other 5ghz Wi-Fi connections nearby, at least for now.  ;D
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: splbound on September 28, 2015, 11:50:08 AM
I initially had homeplugs when I was on an adsl2+ connection. No issues there and used it to pipe data to my mediacenter pc at the TV, wifi was not cutting it.

Soon as I had VDSL2 installed they severely interfered with sync.
The vdsl2 connection would always drop out if I was passing heavy data to the mediaserver via the homeplugs.
The homeplugs were some generic 500mbps ones bought from 7dayshop.

The place is homeplug free now and am using a wireless AC connection to the media PC now, much better than what the homeplugs could achieve.
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: mcfluffy on September 28, 2015, 06:10:45 PM
I think generally speaking the nature of powerline adapters is they run at a higher frequency than standard electrical current, hence how they are used. An ideal installation would be where the two (or more) plugs aren't more than something like 100 foot of power cable away from each other (might be a lot more, or a lot less tbh, don't know the standard spec details assuming they even detail ideal line length), there aren't any high frequency electrical appliances near-by and there aren't any RCD's in-between the plugs.

I think that last one might be a bit difficult to muster if you have different rooms on different RCD's. Of course if you have an older establishment with good old fashioned fuses then RCD's be damned. Though in my old house, we had an extension put in in the 90's and that entire circuit wwas behind RCD's, the upstairs and downstairs were separate so my powerline adapters were on the other sides of at least two RCD's and probably more than 100 foot's worth of power cable. WHich probably explains why they degraded beyond use after a year or so. Might have actually been damaging the RCD.

I think also if you're going to be sticking your steak dinner in the micro every evening that's probably going to affect the stability of the connection between the plugs regardless of how far away the microwave is on the line. Though I can't fathom how powerline adapters could actually cause interference with VDSL lines (I too only used my adapters back when I had an ADSL2 line and they didn't seem to cause problems with it). Clearly some modems/routers are very sensitive with their power input and having the adapter nearby causes enough intefearence for the modem to get a bit jumpy? Assuming that is what's causing it. If it is maybe using some sort of surge protector or whatever they call those things that "clean" the power on just the modem/router might save it from such issues.

At any rate I think these adapters are perhaps ideal for certain situations but the long and the short of it is if you can afford to run an Ethernet cable instead, that is always the better option.
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: roseway on September 28, 2015, 06:27:43 PM
Powerline connectors send high frequency signals along cables which are not twisted or screened, so they act as transmitters. It's inevitable that they will cause interference on occasions, and of course that interference might affect your neighbours, not just you.
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: GigabitEthernet on September 28, 2015, 06:42:40 PM
Powerline connectors send high frequency signals along cables which are not twisted or screened, so they act as transmitters. It's inevitable that they will cause interference on occasions, and of course that interference might affect your neighbours, not just you.


I can't say I've ever noticed that. I believe it's only a problem in earlier models.
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: Weaver on September 28, 2015, 07:00:56 PM
I would suggest that transmitted interference is an essential risk with this kind of device, since the mains wiring which is unscreened forms a great big transmitting antenna. How much of an effect you see depends on geometry, frequencies in use, length of transmitting and receiving wires, susceptibility of kit to received rfi vs how well it filters the incoming noise out, plus all the other factors that I have forgotten just now.

It's not worth the risk, and if you have neighbours, then I would have to say that it is arguably irresponsible, but that's me being harsh. I certainly wouldn't be at all happy if I found one of these devices in use next door to me.

If you've had no problems with them then fair enough, no wish to cause offence to existing users. This is just my own opinion. :-)
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: mcfluffy on September 29, 2015, 10:47:17 PM
Maybe in a block of flats or perhaps a semi-detached or terrace then interference could bleed into your neighbours circuit, but presumably if there's a sufficient enough gap between the mains power inputs, any potential interference caused in a neighbour's property should be negligible enough for it not to matter. I'm only guessing of course, with no real world data I can't do anything but guess. Having said that I just can't believe they're powerful enough to cause definitive interference outside the local circuit (again if it's not close to another one).
Title: Re: Fibre and Homeplugs
Post by: Weaver on September 30, 2015, 04:36:58 PM
@mcfluffy - agreed. I have no idea about what the numbers might be.