Playing with Powerline Ethernet
I was out in Lidl a few months back and picked up a pair of powerline ethernet adapters for €40. Our house is a couple of hundred years old and has walls that are around half a metre thick. This means that my wireless access point is inaccessible in some parts of the house so I figured that the powerline adapters would be perfect to setup an access point at the other end of the house. My cunning plan worked much better than I hoped for.
A quick bandwith test with my laptop connected directly to the adapter gave transfer rates of 40Mbit when copying an iso image from one of my file servers. I hooked up the access point and all was well. Latency is quite good too and the transfer rates have been consistent. All told I was pleased.
However as I now have so much equipment crammed into such a small room here at home, things have been getting a little toasty and with the addition of a Dell Poweredge 1750 humming along with my Poweredge 2800 things have been getting exceptionally noisy as well. There is only one course of action and that is to move them out of my computer room to somewhere else. Unfortunately there is nowhere else in the house to put them as the noise is very hard to escape from.
The only option I could think of is a garage that we own which is about 250m from our house. It is nice and dry, secure and more importantly cool so it would be pretty safe to install a rack in there. Unfortunately it is too far to run an ethernet cable too and I don’t have line of sight to set up a wireless connection. But the garage is connected to our domestic electricity supply so I figured I would do a quick test to see if my cheap powerline ethernet connectors would work up there.
Armed with my laptop and one of the adapters I headed off to the garage and plugged in. Almost instantly the adapter found its partner back at home and my laptop picked up its IP address and lo and behold I was now connected to my LAN.
Browsing the net seemed very snappy indeed but if I was going to install a rack there I needed to find out if I would have enough bandwidth there to make it worth my while. So I downloaded the same iso image that I used for my first test and was mildly surprised with the results. The transfer rate as I thought it would had dropped significantly but it is a solid 12Mbit which is quite usable indeed.
My plan is to move my web and mail servers up there and keep my file servers back in my home office. All I need now is a rack!
That’s pretty cool. Do those adaptors have encryption? I wonder if there’s any chance the line from the garage could leak data to other houses so that, theoretically, someone could snoop on your data.
I doubt it’d happen but you never know!
From the manual for them you only need encryption if you have more than two and the utility can be downloaded from the manufacturers site.
Most of the powerline adapters don’t go beyond the fuse box. I actually popped into the neighbours house next door to check and I couldn’t connect. They’re pretty safe and relatively secure.
Much more dependable than wi-fi too. I think the ones I have are home plug alliance certified too so I should be able to mix and match in the future.
Did you buy a 4-pack of “Princes” tuna chunks in brine on the same shopping trip? anyway 40mbit is quite good
Nope but I bought some Chorizo and Naan Bread
40Mbit was on the same circuit. Getting between 12 and 20 out to the garage 200m away. (rewired since original blog post)
Jury is still out on latency, here’s a ping to a host on the same switch:
64 bytes from 172.20.1.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=128 time=0.374 ms
64 bytes from 172.20.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=128 time=0.288 ms
64 bytes from 172.20.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=128 time=0.310 ms
64 bytes from 172.20.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=128 time=0.266 ms
64 bytes from 172.20.1.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=128 time=0.285 ms
And here is a ping to a host at the end of the powerline connection:
64 bytes from 172.20.1.6: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=2.760 ms
64 bytes from 172.20.1.6: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=2.971 ms
64 bytes from 172.20.1.6: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=2.754 ms
64 bytes from 172.20.1.6: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=3.011 ms
They’re handy for quick lan set-up. You might want to get a spare pair in case of current pair dies, they’re like bulbs, one day one of them just dies. I’ve seen some did. They are popular for people wanting to ‘net ‘their sheds, like myself, and attics! Mine’s wired now using spare two pairs for secondary run in same cable *wink* – one run’s for normal lan and other run’s for ip cams cos they eat up bandwidth hence seperate lans.
Anyway, could you not use 330m CAT5 roll? Should be long enough to run it to your garage and you’ll get 100Mb/s duplex. BTW the adaptors are not duplex so try u/l & d/l simultaneously and check the transfer speed, betcha a pint they’ll be less than half what you’re getting!!
CAT 5 Limit is 100m no?
Regardless getting the CAT 5 to the house is the easy part. Trying to get it to the computer room is a whole other story.