I currently have 2 Belkin powerline adaptors that work quite well between upstairs and downstairs but now I've moved my PC into another bedroom and want to put a powerline adaptor in there. My question is: do I need to buy another Belkin one, or will any brand do?
The Belkins are the kind of curved ones, and I think i bought them off someone on here...
As long as they're all 'Homeplug' compliant & rated at the same speed, they should work fine together, although I guess the safest bet would be to buy Belkin again. If you mix units of different speed ratings, they'll work at the speed of the slowest unit.Originally Posted by Smudger
Smudger (06-01-2014)
I've tried this before, Belkin and Linksys, they do connect together close to specified speed, however they drop a lot and require restart. I've checked online apparently it is due to different noise reduction and filter chips.
Not worth the trouble, go for same brand IMO.
I bottled out and bought an extra TP-link to go with my existing TP-link units. Might have to get another one soon, I expect I will do the same again.
Are they secure? always wondered if someone next door could plug into your connection?
You seriously have neighbours who would come and plug something in on your property?
no, but surely the power is daisy chained from house to house, only with metres inbetween, theres no barrier to stop the signal from going down the cables to the next house?!
Oh I see. They're usually encrypted like wireless.
They have a 128 bit AES encryption system built in, you have to "introduce" a new adapter into the network with a couple of button presses.
Also, the way houses are wired up is on a three phase supply so to get to the same phase you need to skip the next two neighbours and go three doors down. That is quite a lot of rather thick mains cable, so I doubt much signal gets down there. Going through a house circuit breaker panel from one ring to another really drops the signal quality, so going through two as you jump from one house to another is I expect not going to work too well.
In a block of flats there might be more of a signal leakage problem, and the NSA might be able to sniff the radio interference these things are supposed to kick out if you have been a naughty enough chap to grab their attention
If someone could see that you have pressed the button to start pairing then I expect they could piggy back on what you are doing to grab your key, so the paranoid should perhaps do key exchange down stream from a UPS
Ok makes sense! Wouldn't know if I didn't ask! Thanks
Had a few interesting experiences with customers power line adapters connecting to neighbours equipment, especially fun when a guy turned off his wireless hub, his power line WiFi extender but could still connect to his WiFi network, no internet access tho. Turns out his neighbour had a powerline WiFi extender too..
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I thought they have built in pairing during initial installations?
TBH, looking at it, it's not that much more to get 3 new TPLink 500Mpbs, with one as a passthrough. I think I'll do that...
Cheers guys, this thread motivated me to actually try something, rather than believe supposition.
My mum's workshop is at poor wireless range and brother in law tried to stop me trying out powerline networking, 'cos workshop is on separate ring.
So, I tried it anyway and all worked perfectly.
Praise science!
Good stuff
I have 4 of these adapters now, I got a spare with passthrough a while ago when Ebuyer had them on offer.
I tried going from the garage to the living room, extreme opposite sides of the house through the consumer unit. Got 5Mbyte/sec sending a 1.8Gbyte tgz file over SSH (so it wouldn't have been compressing much if at all).
Not a scientific test by any means as I have a security video camera currently working across the house wiring and the kids might have been watching youtube or similar. Nice to see it work at all though, WiFi is pretty flaky in the garage. I was worried that with 4 adapters I would start to see scaling problems.
Perhaps when I get an internet connection that can manage more than 4MB/sec I might start wanting something faster, but for now I think I am good.
Does the quality of the existing wiring in the house matter, like what if its really old?
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