Powerline

[GatorChamp]

So I am finishing up college and I am going to be moving in with the mom and dad for a little while I get going (no more student loans). The internet is set up is like this: There are three houses on the property all owned by my bother. He has a 12mb connection in his house. My father and I ran a CAT5 from his house to theirs setting up a wireless access point to broadcast wireless in parents house, as the signal is a little weak coming from my brothers house. I am not a fan of wireless, it has however, been very convenient. I have been looking into Powerline and was wondering if there were anyone who is using it on the forums who would care to share their opinion.

Second, I would be the only one using Powerline as my mom and dad could care less about ping and latency so I would still want to broadcast the wireless signal. So recommendations on how to do this? They have 1 cat5 cable coming into their house from my brothers that give the signal.

[I.M.O.G.]

Moved to INS forum, was in classifieds. :thup:

For wireless, plug the cat5 in your parents house into a wireless AP set it up as a repeater. Configuration settings for that depend on the specific hardware you are using - but it can be done with pretty much any consumer wireless router I've seen. It is pretty easy.

[leobkny]

The speed you will get over powerlines is almost the same as an N band wireless signal. But will cost you more to setup.
Run Cat 5 from the wireless router to the PC.

[GatorChamp]

Thanks for moving it, guess I was not paying attention.
@Ieobkny
About the same really? I was seeing network transfers on powerwire being around 5MB a sec and wireless was toppings out at about 1mb depending where you are. Just running the CAT5 seems to be the best idea.

@IMOG Currently the AP is just a wireless broadcaster, no other plugs in it. Would I degrade the wireless connection and the connection going to my computer, if I just put some type of wired AP and put a CAT5 into my desktop and then ran another wire to the wireless AP? The signal at the point would be going through 1 router and 2 AP.

[leobkny]

Yes, you will never get the rated speeds. It depends on how clean the power line is etc etc etc... I was looking into this myself and when i did some research found that people didn't get much more out of it than N band.

[GatorChamp]

Ok well thanks for the info.

[g0dM@n]

I've tested powerline in the same bedroom, and my connection was about the speed comparable to a 100mbit LAN if I recall correctly, which is comparable to a really strong wireless N just as someone else said...
but...
it'll also depend on your power wiring quality, and quite possibly DISTANCE.

I'll tell you the problem with powerline for me:
I could not go from upstairs to downstairs, probably because the power upstairs was COMPLETELY separate from downstairs. I heard that if your circuit breaker is set up with 2 rows, that each row could be separate, but I'm not electrician... that's how mine is set up and powerline doesn't work upstairs to downstairs for me, so I assumed that was the case for me...

[BugFreak]

For wireless, plug the cat5 in your parents house into a wireless AP set it up as a repeater. Configuration settings for that depend on the specific hardware you are using - but it can be done with pretty much any consumer wireless router I've seen. It is pretty easy.
The wireless router will lose some bandwidth for other wireless clients in doing so though.

From the DD-WRT wiki:
Also take note of the fact that all repeaters, including this Wlan Repeater mode, will sacrifice half of the bandwidth available from the primary router for clients wirelessly connected to the repeater. This is a result of the repeater taking turns talking to not just one partner, but to two, and having to relay the traffic between them. As long as your bandwidth requirements are within this halved bandwidth amount there will be little or no reduction in "speed".

[I.M.O.G.]

Cool, never thought of that - thanks. :)

[g0dM@n]

Wow I didn't know that... no wonder my laptop can do 6-10mb/s and my stuff hooked up to my wireless bridge do roughly 3.5mb/s...