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I tried powerline for quite some time and thought it was useful. But once I became a homeowner, I decided it was time to wire my house for ethernet. To be honest -- it's one of the smarter things I've done when it comes to networking. Not only am I getting the full bandwidth out of my cable modem subscription, but I also walked away knowing more about how my house fits together.

Since I've done that, I've been able to diagnose other problems in the house that don't have anything to do with networking. It's not that hard, and if you're not-a-renter, it's a great little project that'll give you knowledge over your house should other things go wrong.

Don't get me wrong -- powerline's great. But cat6 is greater, cheaper, easier, not mutually-exclusive, and, unlike powerline, adds value onto the house.

Where are you? I'm surprised that wired-in-ethernet adds noticeable value to a house — I rarely see ethernet used except by technically minded people; most people I know just use wifi for everything nowadays. (I know, anecdotal, but I'm wondering if geographic area has anything to do with attitudes about this.)
I think it has more to do with the market segment to which your home belongs than it does your geography. For example, where I live only higher-end homes have built in wiring suitable for computer networking. However, homes in the mid-range can be fitted with this type of wiring as an upgrade. It's not uncommon to see it listed as an upgrade when it's present, and this is in a non-urban area of the Florida east coast.

I bootstrapped my way in to the startup scene by starting out doing in-home computer repair, so I've been in a lot of houses to see the variety and extent of the wiring available. My experience is that a homeowner only needs to experience a home wired for ethernet one time time before it becomes a "must have" on all future home purchases. Even for non-tech-savy home owners.

I don't find this result unexpected at all. In fact, ever since I had my two PLC adapters I've taken the speed as granted.

I can agree with OP about the superiority of Powerline. I've stretched them as much as running it in my old house to a cottage circa 25 meters from the router. In the cottage I've had 6 computers linked to Internet trough 3 switches, which all come down to the single PLC adapter. Latency and overall bandwidth is almost the same, whilst WiFi struggles to even reach some devices, such as phones.

For OP I would suggest trying different wall sockets as well; I've noticed that different wall sockets provide different speeds, whilst some don't even work for me.

The adapters I'am using are low tier D-Link adapters.

Different wall sockets may well be on different legs of the three phase power. That may be why you can't communicate from one to the other.
Phrase to google for is residential split phase.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_phase

you're talking about classic high leg delta aka "why is one of my wires orange?" which is psuedo-obsolete nowadays.

Its the same fundamental problem, anyway, in that signals have to go back to the nearest power pole transformer which doesn't pass the signals very well.

Sorry?

I am talking about three phase power. You get three legs running into your home (at least in The Netherlands, where I am most familiar with the electrical system).

This split phase stuff may be right for US based homes... in which case it is the same concept anyhow.

Technically you mean opposite phase, not three-phase.

Three-phase power is rarely (never?) seen in residential settings. It's a commercial/industrial service.

Edit: s/opposite polarity/opposite phase/

In Europe (Portugal at least) three-phase is the norm in residential installs. I assume it's because that way the power company gets to gouge you on the power fee. You need to sign up for more total power as your consumption is never perfectly balanced between the three phases.
In the US maybe, in Europe (The Netherlands at least) three phase power to the home is the norm. Split phase is weird to me...
Yep, I was speaking about the US. Didn't know that about Europe. In the US three-phase power is only seen in commercial or industrial installations. I know a machinist who has a lathe in his home workshop that requires three-phase power. He can't get it from the utility so he makes his own by using a single-phase electric motor to drive a three-phase motor as a generator.
As a HAM radio operator, I was playing around with ethernet over powerline adapters and it caused all kinds of issues. Signal quality to many repeaters dropped, and I would get random interference when one of the computers would wake up.

Instead I just wired my whole house with Cat6 instead. Nice patch panel in the basement, and I am a happy camper.

Thats because powerline adapters turn your normal, non isolated wiring into a big antenna.

(Interestingly, the FCC does not seem to care that 50$ boxes are messing up public frequency bands.)

You have to be careful with powerline, because plugging a new device into your power system may completely kill your network. When engineers design home appliances they do not assume that your power wires are used to transmit data, so their appliances can add all kinds of noise over the power wires.

For example, the inverters of solar panels are known to kill powerline networking.

You can buy filters to reduce noise.

http://www.amazon.com/Smarthome-1626-10-FilterLinc-10-Amp-Fi...

If anyone is wondering what Powerline is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug

Basically IP over the same wires that you use for electricity.

Seems pretty crazy!

I've been using TP-Link powerline for the last year at home or so, I can warmly recommend them:

http://www.tp-link.com/en/products/?categoryid=206

Compared to wifi (which was stopped by stone walls in my old countryside house), the connection is more snappy and faster.

Since my garage is ~100m away but on the same circuit, I can also get good internet access over there :-)

The technology has been around for 10 years...
It's been progressively updated (faster speeds, more reliable, more secure[1]) and in recent years, standardised (I think we're on the second version of the standard now) to enable interop/less interference between gear from different manufacturers.

[1] Yes, secure. Much like wifi, power lines do leave your house :), and despite claims to the contrary, the signal can be strong enough on the other side of circuit breakers/RCDs for it to be picked up by attackers (or neighbours). Hence encryption of the whole system.

Some forms of this are way older - X10 was developed in 1975!
I've been using the older Powerline technology for a couple of years now, I think the adapter is rated 200Mb/s, but I only get about 26Mb/s on the other machine.

Anyway, the latest generation of Powerline is called G.hn: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.hn As you can see, it's targeting 1Gb/s rates, which is pretty cool!

G.hn gear you can buy has been slow in coming, and it's got competition. I found a good overview of the situation here:

www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/05/feature_powerline_networking_the_next_generation/print.html

I had to use Powerline adapters in my apartment and was skeptical because of early problems. I have been very impressed. I've had no problems. Although I don't understand why the manufacturers put 100 Mbps Ethernet on 500 Mbps adapters. Probably because 500 Mbps real world performance is closer to 100 Mbps.
That's the capacity of the entire network,so if you had multiple adapters data between them might travel at 500Mbps even if each individual computer is capped at 100Mbps.
Its the maximum physical rate of the mains interface, but in reality they won't achieve close to that rate unless they are welded to each other in an anechoic chamber with a noiseless sine wave supply.
I'm not surprised by this result, though mine was the exact opposite: I migrated from powerline to an 802.11ac bridge.

I'd turned to powerline a few years ago, once it became clear that, between the walls and my neighbors, I couldn't reasonably cover my apartment with only one access point. It more-or-less worked, but was pretty flaky (fluctuating speed, lots of trouble streaming video, resetting the powerline adapters and/or other devices several times a week, etc.). Eventually I started to notice patterns, like speed always dropping when we ran the washer or dryer. I ended up deciding that our apartment wiring just wasn't good enough to do powerline networking reliably (not shocking, we've had issues on other fronts).

Since I wasn't in a position to get the landlord to upgrade our wiring, I went looking for a powerline alternative. Fortunately for me, by then 802.11ac was just ready enough for me to jump onto the bleeding edge. 802.11ac has had its own issues, but I can reliably watch Netflix, Amazon and YouTube in my bedroom and that's what counts.

Microwaves run at 2.4GHz and mostly interrupt wifi in that band. This means they mostly impact b,g and n, but not a or ac. Upgrading to ac should help his wireless experience considerably.
"[this] gave rise to a Wi-Fi "microwave oven interference robustness" mode that segments larger data frames into fragments each small enough to fit into the oven's "off" periods."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_interference_a...

Well anything that operates on 5GHz will avoid 2.4Ghz interference. So even 5GHz 802.11n will work.
OP here - Yes, I am aware that ac should take care of the interference issue. Of course if you run 5Ghz n that should as well, but distance is a real PITA for 5GHz. I've read that the 5GHz on ac uses beam forming to increase distance/throughput. But that would be just as much an experiment at this point as the Powerline adapters were. And ac routers and adapters are rather expensive right now, particularly compared to the Powerline equivalents.
I upgraded to 11ac from an early generation powerline adaptor because it wasn't reliable. It is much more reliable over the short distance, but as my house is brick/block construction I find the range at 5GHz drops off quickly. So when I am in the lounge I get 135Mbit/sec at 5GHz but outside barely a sniff of 5GHz, however the 2.4GHz still works.

My old powerline adaptors are now in service feeding my workshop with network, but I only get 40Mbps on my gigabit network. Currently contemplating fibre just because of the small size and low loss.

I've actually switched from a ~200Mbps effective 450N link to 200Mbps powerline adapters which provide ~90Mbps effective.

I've been pleased with the results. It is slower for single, large data streams. However, I primarily use my home network to access a NAS, and it seems to be smoother and faster over powerline- perhaps because there are far fewer lost packets, and it is supposed to be full duplex (?) so it behaves better in a random-access situation. In theory there is also more headroom for other devices, while WiFi generally sucks up all the available spectrum for just one device.

Or he could just run some CAT-6 cable.
Or he lives in an apartment and running CAT6 isn't really an option.
He lives in a house.

I base this on two things.

(1) Apartments usually only have one floor. The article says he was having trouble with wifi between floors. That is not proof, but it is suggestive enough to warrant looking harder.

(2) He links to his Google+ stuff, and one of the things there is a photo of a house with Christmas decorations, which he describes as "Christmas lights near our house", and he links to Google maps for that lighted house. That house is in the middle of a vast sea of houses, with no apartments within a kilometer. All the apartment buildings with 6 km only offer units with one floor of living space (some do have a second floor, but it is a garage).

It's a pain in the ass no matter where you live. Making using existing wires that much more appealing.
Actually looked into this. While the family machine is directly downstairs from where the cable modem comes into the house, my computer is on the far other side. Cost to get Cat-6 run there was going to be expensive, and I have no desire to go up in my attic and work a couple hours in South Texas heat this time of year :-)
I just run stuff along the ceiling or baseboard. It's ugly, but I'm single so I'm allowed to do ugly things in my house. Here's my ethernet cable on the way from the living room to the cable modem which is on the opposite side of my house, joined by the speaker cable for the right rear surround channel [1].

[1] http://imgur.com/nBqo2n7

Google for "spiral cable wrap" Its a spiral cut "sleeve" that can be wrapped around multiple cables. Available in a couple colors, hopefully one matching your decor.

I have one along the wall in my living room, multiple surround sound speaker wires, cabled ethernet to the TV area switch, couple other wires. Back when composite video wasn't too out of date, I used to feed signals all over my house...

I just had my whole house wired up with Cat6. 2 runs each to 6 rooms + garage in the house.

$800, not including cost of materials. That's pretty cheap considering.

How did they wire it? Attic? Basement?
We live in a terraced house in the UK, and using the new Virgin SuperHub 2 and its 5.0GHz connection I can get full speed of our Internet - 125Mbps, even on my phone(HTC One). Powerline(using TP-Link 200Mbps adapters) maxes out at 80Mbps in every room of the house.
If you're thinking about doing this, make sure your 500 plug comes with a gigabit port. Some of them are only 10/100.