Thread: Ethernet over power.

I've been using them for about 18 months. They have their moments but overall I am quite happy with them. I am using mainly TP-Link. Orange in Sydney have them at quite a reasonable price. See



I also have a number of Billion Powerline adaptors which are quite hard to get hold of but interoperate well with the TPLink's and have a model which doubles as an 80211n access point. Will stream standard def video from a mythtv box and via vlc from a dreambox without problems. Haven't tried HD.

Your mileage may vary. Apparently they may not work across different circuits, though I have not found this in quite a large house. You also should be aware that the next generation is faster though no doubt correspondingly more expensive, at least initially.

I have one more remote area of the house where the adapter is hooked up to an old netgear 4 port switch which runs two pc's, a voip telephone and a network printer quite successfully.

The TP link one is a bit buggy, drops in and out especially when a ned device is powered on.

I have used a belkin one but it was only 75mpbs but good for Internet, email etc but bit slow for high speed gaming and lower ping times

Mate of mine uses a Netcomm one, pretty sure thats the brand it is a small white box that has inbuilt wireless so it can expand your wireless network by creating an an access point and it has x2 cat 5/6 connections so you could add x2 devices. He plays high speed gaming and streams media from his Pc to his TV using it with no hassles. But be carefull with this as they sell them with only one adaptor in the box with some models, it is marked but its a pain if you bought it rather than buying a pari. The speed is around ~200mbps and very easy to use and setup.

I would reccomend these, go checkout HN for the brand then google it, mate did that when he bought his.

Upgrade your cat 5 cable to cat 5e or 6 for the main connections and cabling.

These devices work on a copper loop in your electrical wiring. If you are in a big hosue sometimes there can be more than 2 loops so if a device is on the other loop then it will not work.

You could use the power over lan device to hook up multiple routers/switches around your house if you have multiple devices at the other end. Pretty easy to use and setup.

These will only work when directly plugged into a power point or a power board that has no surge proctection on it.

hope this helps

I run 4 of the netcomm 200mbps in my house due to cabling limitations.
They run fine. I stream all of my movies etc to my tv that is on another circuit in the house fine.
Two of the outlets are direct into the wall socket and the other two are on power boards.
I had to experiment with the powerboards and the outlets position on them to get the best results. On the wrong powerboard, there was no connection at all, and in a different position on the current powerboard resulted in very poor speeds.

Originally Posted by gordon_s1942

I always wondered why some of these devises dont like to work over different circuits in a house when all the circuits are terminated at the fuse box unless they dont like the fuse wire between them, could it be that the fuse wire is resistive in some way and the devises see it as a choke ?

The circuits are most likely on different phases

yup thats right.........

I'm currently running the WD Livewire kit, I would say the speeds are average ~ 50Mbs (for me) ... compared to if I actually ran a network cable (even though it's rated up to 200Mbs) currently I have one adapter connected to my router in the study and the other adapter is in the lounge (a few walls away)

I can't complain too much though, it beats trying to stream movies etc over wireless. At least now HD stuff isn't all choppy.

The setup was easy, I didn't bother to use the supplied software, from what I read it isn't that great.

I have just scored a cheap Dlink power over LAN adaptor, plan to set it up soon an see how it goes. Will be used to access my NAS using my media player in the bedroom. For this it will easily do the trick but for copying large files it might be slow.

Dlink has never been my favorite brand but for $30 I couldnt resist.

I'll trial it out and let you know the results

Update to my earlier post, my mate has just purchased a third netcomm one and could not be happier with how it's running. Even noticed a slight speed increase which is strange as he is only transferring data from one device to the other and only using the third for streaming video/audio.