Yeah I have tried it! It beats WiFi to some rooms, but to my office it's very slow.

You would never be able to predict this, which is an unfortunate thing about powerline IMO. You just have to buy the modems and see how they perform on your particular wiring.

And how stably. Ours works amazing if you ignore that it duplicates packets 2-3 times for no reason (netting a few hundred megabits, many times the speed that VDSL is able to deliver here), but then it will die for a few minutes roughly once or twice a day, unpredictably. Thankfully we only need it for the bedroom and everything else reaches from a centrally hung 'router'. When it's down again, we briefly switch to mobile data or the poor signal we get from downstairs or we, y'know, get out of bed or turn off the phone and go sleep, depending on the time of day :-)

It's a strange pattern and I'd be interested to solve the mystery. Not many powerline debugging tools available though, not to say none

Yeah I get occasional dropouts in the setup I installed at my mum's place too.

And yeah it's just a bit of a weird black box, and also fundamentally it's exploiting a nontrivial system to do something that had little relationships to its design goals. I don't know anything about electrical systems but I assume there is all kinds of random shit that can disrupt Powerline links while still being fully within the design envelope of the power system.

Do you have personal success using powerline ethernet? I tried it once and it was utter shit.

A very expensive "up to 1000mbps" kit maxed out at ~200 when both devices were plugged into the same outlet. It just got worse with distance.

(Repeating myself coz I saw this after writing my sibling comment..)

It's highly variable in my experience. I've had it work pretty well in some situations and barely at all in others.

I have certainly never got 1000mbps. I think I have got 300 at best. In my office I can only get about 50 even though it works pretty well in other parts of the same small apartment.

... Which is kinda annoying coz they aren't really all that cheap for something you have to just buy and then find out later if it actually works!

I tried this once too and instead bought a big-ass SRS bit and went through a concrete wall instead.

Rock solid and reliable networking =)

Just a bit of side opinion working rf and some electrical, and fully understand if that was the best you could get, but some outlets are wired on different circuits. Also, some rf devices get overloaded if you're too close and that can degrade performance. Not saying that's definitively what happened, but you could have been either too close or further than you thought

For me it is good but I'm in an apartment with 300mbps internet so not really pushing it.

As is MoCA, which in my experience is a lot higher-speed and more reliably so.

People tend to want speed, speed, speed, but tons of use cases are totally fine with a reliable 100 Mbps. For a lot of remote monitoring stuff, even 1 kbps is enough if it works reliably. Not everything needs to serve up a webpage.

for anyone else wondering, that new acronym means coax

> MoCA (stands for Multimedia over Coax Alliance) is a technology that uses the existing coaxial cables

It’s been around for quite some time. I assumed it would be known around here. The lowest level is 100 Mbps and I keep telling people on Reddit that 100 Mbps is plenty for so many use cases. I wouldn’t install it on a new plant, but if it’s there, use it.