Speed from home plug

Stiofain2006

Hi there. I have 50mb UPC. I have a home plug running off the router in my bedroom with the other one out in my garage (separate building running off the same power grid). The Ethernet from the 2nd home plug in the garage is going into another router out there. I m only getting speeds of about 1.5mb on wireless devices connected to that router. This compares to speeds of 25mb in the main house. Can anyone offer any solutions as to why the speed I'm getting is so slow?

Popoutman

a) you are using powerline ethernet = and these generally do not work well except under ideal conditions.
b) chances are the two ends of the powerline virtual circuit are on different rings in the house, with MCBs between them. These are pretty effective radio filters preventing the signal from propagating along the mains cables. From your description you are likely to have two RCDs as well.
c) because the powerline ethernet adapters are not "seeing" each other, they will generally up the power usage for the signal, making noise all over the radio spectrum affecting all other radios in the area such as wifi points, baby monitors etc.

You are better off running a cat5 cable from one place to the other to get connectivity. Either that or set up a wifi bridge, though you may need better aerials such as a pair of yagi antennae to get signal between the two areas.

srsly78

What homeplugs do you have, and how is your second router configured?

Try an android app called WiFi speed test to test lan speed.

I have a similar setup and the only bottleneck is the 100mbit ethernet port on the homeplug. Isolate the plugs from any other electrical devices, don't plug in stuff beside them. Check if the manufacturer provides diagnostic software, this can help find out what is gimping connection.

Poster above is wrong, modern plugs generally work very well. Older ones were lousy tho and bad setup can really degrade performance.

Wifi bridge = worst advice, this gimps both your networks.

Popoutman

@srsly78 I would beg to differ.

Homeplugs will work well enough only on the same physical cable on the same section of mains downstream from an MCB. Once you cross an MCB or RCD the radio portions get filtered out - hence the poor performance. Given that in most home builds, the garage is on a different MCB to the outlets in the house, this is likely the case in this situation. As this is likely the case, homeplugs are not the answer for the OP's use case - and other options have to be looked at.

As an FYI wifi bridging done properly is a good alternative if there is no other alternative. I've set up a number of networks using this and the customer was happy. I'd like to hear your clarification of "gimps both your networks"? It sounds as though you have experience with a poorly set up bridge? I've had a wifi bridge on my home network for the past few years to give connectivity to my security camera server, generally without issue. The only issue was when the neighbour set up homeplugs on different MCBs and the noise floor in the wifi range shot up..

Given how poorly the powerline ethernet devices perform when it comes to radio interference, I always recommend against using them. There are always better alternatives, that don't pollute the radio spectrum. They are faulty by design in this respect, and cannot be made to behave.

srsly78

Wifi bridging = wifi repeater: this halves the bandwidth of the wifi network. It's awful.

Homeplugs do NOT interfere with wifi, they are tested for this. Indeed many homeplugs have built-in wifi, why would they interfere with themselves? There are reports of older devices interfering with HAM radio and such but this is tinfoil hat territory. I think the various reports of this are from old faulty gear tbh. I get the full 75mbit from my wifi, no interference. I have moved house several times over the last few years and the homeplugs were perfect each time, even in places with dodgy wiring like where I am now.

I have homeplugs in my garage, on a seperate circuit - I get loads of throughput (>100mbit). However if anything is sharing the socket then it drops to 10mbit. The only criticism I have on my current devolo model is the 100mbit ethernet ports, which creates a silly bottleneck. But you don't even believe I could reach this throughput anyway right?

Lots of people use homeplugs and are very happy with them. Have you tried any modern ones at all? I will grant you that further in the past (2005 I think) I tried them and they just did not work at all.

OP you do not even get full speed on your main network, so start by optimising that (use wifi N 5ghz mode).

Popoutman

Actually - you are quite mistaken as to what a wifi bridge is.

A real wifi bridging device takes cabled ethernet on one side and a non-802.11 radio on the other side, A matching device takes that radio stream and drops it back to ethernet. This makes the two bridging devices act as a cable with the bandwidth of the wireless link. This is very different to wifi repeating, which is less than ideal. I've used two WRT54AP devices as a basic bridge, and gotten throughputs close to theoretical using these, without having to use Yagis. I've set up a bridge over 100m for a customer that worked as expected. It's a known tech that works well. Others have used yagi antennae up to 1km with expected results.

It appears that you have had a good experience with the home powerline adapters, that's great for you, but not representative of the experience that I have had with them over the past decade. How do you consider that you are getting >100mbit connection if you can't actually measure it given the 100mbit cabling?

There's no getting away form the radio frequency poisoning though - after all mains cabling is a pretty effective antenna. Can't get away from the laws of physics can you? After all, when putting RF on straight wires means they radiate, and the circuitry has poor control of sideband RF. Newer ones are better than older ones for sure (they had to when the poisoning was as bad as it was), but it's still broken by design, and something that I refuse to recommend to anyone.

Popoutman

Something that the OP may want to try as well - is to pick one of the three WiFi channels (1,6,12) that has the least other traffic on it. These are the only 3 channels that can be used without interfering with each other.

Use an app such as "wifi analyser" to see the wifi SSIDs active in the area, and see which frequency range is least populated, and set the garage access point to use that channel. It may be that there is simply too much other wireless traffic in the area to get usable connectivity.
Check both the 2.4ghz and the 5ghz ranges. If your devices are not capable of 802.11n then you may be out of luck.

srsly78

You mean wireless bridging. If it's non-wifi why would you call it a wifi bridge? Completely different story, yes it's good for long range - but a bit ridiculous for a home setup.

My main hub is limited to 100mbit (it has 4 ethernet ports). There are 2 other homeplugs with gigabit ports and they show a real throughput of over 150mbit/sec. The diagnostic software shows the link speed as 330mbit+ but this seems to be half duplex. There are the newer homeplugs advertised as 500mbit devices, but of course you won't get that.

If you are gonna complain about RF interference then you know that EVERYTHING causes interference. But it's no big deal usually, I have never had a problem with it. Fridges next to your phoneline are the usual suspect.

We do agree on ethernet cables at least, these are a surefire win - but may not be practical for some people. I could easily run some through the attic here but I am just lazy and have the homeplugs which work perfectly. Only got 15mbit internet so it's all overkill, and lan performance is fine.

OP you have 2 things to diagnose, 1 your wifi network setup itself, and 2 your homeplugs. Most Irish households do not have their wifi set optimally. Even then note that wifi bandwidth gets split between all users, so that 25mbit is shared! To stop people hogging the connection and so on you need a QoS router which is another consideration.

Do not use "mixed mode" wifi, this drags the whole network down to support older devices. If all devices have wifi N then use that only. If there are older devices present it's best to setup a second wifi network to serve them (and thus not interfere with the newer ones). This is really simple stuff for anyone with technical knowledge but may prove difficult for a non-engineer - get one of your buddies in to help if possible.

Homeplugs are usually very easy to setup, your problem is likely because you did not isolate them. Make sure they are on their own!!! The "pass through" models are helpful for this, because you can still use the plug for power but without interfering.

Popoutman

It's known to most network engineers as "wifi bridging" as 802.11 devices can be used in a bridging mode. The resulting radio communications are not 802.11 compliant (i.e. you can't pick it up with a compliant 802.11 receiver), but it's still in the 2.4ghz range. There's no ambiguity there. A wireless bridge is not a wireless repeater and the terms are pretty well defined and understood by people that work with the technologies concerned.

Yes it's true that there is RF from many devices, but moist devices output power at a low level by comparison with the powerline adapters. If RF is coming from a device, that device is faulty either in operation or in design. The homeplug "standard" creates a unnecessary amount of RF *by design* and that is unacceptable. If your fridge is causing a lot of RF then maybe get the motor brushes replaced and it'll usually operate better from an interference point of view.

As it is, the OP has powerline adapters that are working poorly - therefore other avenues should be explored.

srsly78

It's not engineers you are advising, so be precise. If Joe Blogs goes looking for a "WiFi bridge" the clowns in PC world will sell him a repeater.

gabbo is coming

srsly78 wrote: »

It's not engineers you are advising, so be precise. If Joe Blogs goes looking for a "WiFi bridge" the clowns in PC world will sell him a repeater.

Want to get weak wifi signal to a room with no wifi signal in house

I'm wary of repeaters

Would this work and what would its wifi range be like?


http://www.harveynorman.ie/computing/networking-and-connectivity/av200-wireless-n-powerline-adapter.html

srsly78

That's the old model. Don't buy off the likes of harvey norman, just go onto amazon and get the av500 models.

I have some tp-link av500s - and they work very well in conjunction with av500 devolos. If you set it up properly it will give lots of range.

Note: set it up properly -> means isolate the plugs, and set wifi N 5ghz only! Also update firmware on the plugs.

I would recommend the devolo plugs, just because they come with an easy update utility --> one click to update firmware on all devices.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Devolo-dLAN-500-Wireless-Starter/dp/B00A67I5EK - this is an updated version of the one I have - it has gigabit ethernet ports.

Stiofain2006

Thanks guys. You both know far more than me. If either of you lived in Limerick or Clare I d be asking for a call out. Anyway I had the devolo's plugged into power adapters on both sides. I removed them both and I am now getting speeds ~9mb. This is plenty for my needs in the garage. Delighted thx