Posts tagged "electricity"
Show Your Working: Making Powerline Ethernet faster
Sun 25 February 2024
Having wired networking is nice! The current iterations of Wi-Fi are admittedly very fast, but I feel a bit iffy trusting that the signal will always work at a good latency, when there's rogue slabs of concrete and surprise microwave sources to deal with.
My house has fiber internet which terminates at the wireless router I keep under my TV. To enable mission-critical house activities (e.g. streaming from my studio to Twitch/Diode Zone, using Steam Link from the couch), I have some Powerline Ethernet adapters which link the router to my studio PC upstairs. And for the past several years, they have been indistinguishable from magic; somehow they turn 1970s home electrical wiring into Cat 5e!
Until the rubber finally met the road; I tried to watch a Blu-Ray on my Home Theatre PC, streamed from my Studio PC, and it had big buffering pauses every 60 seconds. An early speed test I did showed the link speed for streaming the Blu-Ray was only 24 Mbps! But for some reason, downloading things from the studio PC was absolutely fine! At this point I realised I knew very little about how the magic boxes worked, or how I would go about isolating the problem.