Tag Archives: homeplug AV2 MIMO

Homeplug AV2 with MIMO: real life

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I posted about my early experiences with this technology about 8 months ago here and here.

At the time of these posts the apartment was perfectly empty except for the adapter and the notebook I was using.
Now, after a full renovation including the electrical infrastructure, it is a real home with all the associated devices and appliances connected and operating.
Another important change is that, due to the limits of the electrical tubing connecting upper and lower level, I had to connect the two levels using the same technology and now I have in place 4 adapters from the same manufacturer.

What I read right now in the monitor from the upper level is:
110 Mbit/s to the lower level
70 Mbit/s to the garage
60 Mbit/s to the underground room.

To the garage what I get at the application level moving data to the garage is about 3MB/s (a bit shy of 30Mbit/s) when using a backup program targeting a share on the LS220D and about half of this when using directly a samba share on the same device to move files with windows explorer.

The number reported are in the lowest range of the day and they can easily get 30% better than this depending on the amount of electrical noise tha is injected on the line from the other apartments on my building.

Marketing proves to be even more distant from the reality than I already complained about. But it is still better than WiFi in my environment.

I’m experiencing some significant brownouts during the day with the worst quality during the evening and at lunch time.
This might also be a factor, but I have opened a complaint and in a couple of months should be addressed by my electricity distribution company.

Homeplug AV2 with MIMO: a month later

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A month after my first installation I gained additional insight about my electrical layout.

It turns out that my apartment and my basement/underground room are not directly wired: I can turn off the meter of the apartment while I still have power in the garage and underground room.
This means that most likely only ground and neutral are shared.
In the best case the phase is hared too but has multiple elements in the middle: at least two meters.

Given the circumstances the 60Mbit/s are not too bad.
Changing the plug type in the basement fitting a new round “German” type and removing the adapter I was using earlier did not change the signal quality.

On the bad side: I tried the firmware upgrade of the adapters and now the powerline utilities can’t talk with the adapters anymore.
Yet the adapters talk to each other: I’m going to keep this setup until the endo of warranty approaches or I get a proper cat 5e cable to connect the two places.

Homeplug AV2 with MIMO: marketing, hope, reality

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In a couple of months I will move into a new apartment and with this comes a new underground room and a new garage that I want to connect to the apartment.
Wifi is not really an option in this environment due to the relative positioning of the spaces and I decided to give another try at homeplug.

In the past I had a base HomeplugAV and the performance was a disappointment.
Better than wi-fi in the specific location that I needed to reach (where wifi signal was nonexistent) and useable for light internet navigation, but not an acceptable transmission layer to do a backup.

This time I went for the latest and greatest incarnation of the standard to get another disappointment.
Marketing: 1200Mbit/s
Hope: 350Mbit/s reported by the monitoring tool in the garage and 186MBit/s in the underground room.
Reality: 60-70Mbit/s in samba file transfer
It is much faster than the earlier HomeplugAV, but the marketing-reality gap is still embarrassing.

The product is clearly geared toward IT-illiterates: the monitoring tool is extremely limited.
Sometime the tool goes nuts completely: it claimed that the local adapter was not connected while at the same time a file transfer was happily ongoing.

The price for the TP Link PA8030P kit is not popular at the moment, but you get 3 gigabit ethernet ports that in many cases removes the need for an additional switch and a leading edge technology.
Should I find a way to bring an ethernet cable from the apartment I’ll quickly dump (again) homeplug, but until then it is better than nothing, better than wi-fi in the specific location and better than the older versions of the standard.
Should you have to use your electrical wiring for data then go for AV2 with MIMO: the saving obtained by using the older versions quickly vanishes once you start experiencing the even lower performance associated with the earlier version.