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Forum Discussion
Powerline ethernet 85 Mbps turbo works, 200 Mbps doesn't, will 500+ work?
Strange problem with powerline ethernet (bear with me, I know results are highly variable).
I originally bought a pair of 85 Mbps (Turbo) powerline ethernet adapters to hook up my AV gear to the router upstairs. After experimenting to find the best sockets, it got about 55 Mbps performance.
A couple of years later I upgraded to the Netgear 200 Mbps adapters when they were on sale, and that improved performance between the same sockets to about 90 Mbps.
Then I got a cable TV box and router that supported ethernet over coax, and I used that for a while before I had to return it at end of contract.
I put the Netgear powerline ethernet adapters back in place, same sockets as before, and they wouldn't connect at all. I tried every experiment I could think of. I unplugged everything that was new in the house since I last had them installed. By moving them to different sockets I eventually got a very poor and erratic connection around 11 Mbps. I experimented with unplugging absolutely everything except the essential components. No good, no improvement. But they still connect at 185 Mbps when plugged into the same wall socket next to each other.
Then I put the old 85 Mbps turbo adapters back. They still connect at 45 Mbps, a little worse than before, but not much.
So what's wrong here? Has one of the Netgear adapters failed while sitting in the box unused? Is there some strange new source of noise on my power lines that I can't identify that impacts only the frequency range used by the 200 Mpbs adapters?
The latter is my concern. If I buy a new set of 500/1000/1200/2000 speed adapters, will they turn out to have the same problem as the 200 Mbps adapters because they are sensitive to interference in the same range? Can anyone think of a test I could do to identify such interference?
3 Replies
Did you "factory reset" the plugs?
You are trying to revive seriously old devices. The technology has come on apace since AV200. The older ones won't even adhere to the AV standard.
Yes, I tried factory reset.
The original Homeplug AV standard is much older than these units, although that has little to do with it. You can still buy new 200 Mbps units in the store, so it's a current standard. More to the point, the old Turbo 85 Mbps mode (not a HomePlug AV standard) uses up to 30 MHz, just like the later 200 MHz Homeplug AV standard.
The newer Homeplug AV2 standard is more recent, and uses frequencies up to 85 MHz.
AAJ102a wrote:
The original Homeplug AV standard is much older than these units, although that has little to do with it.
Netgear specifically states that its original Powerline devices use Home Plug 1.0 Specifications, which will not work with newer plugs.
The people behind the technology say that "HomePlug AV uses frequencies in the range of two to 28 MHz. The IEEE 1901 standard extends this range optionally to 50 Mhz. HomePlug AV2 utilizes frequencies in the range of 30 to 86 MHz to increase throughput."
It is the Ethernet speed that matters.
I'm sure that people are still trying to unload 200 Mbps plugs, although most suppliers abandoned them some years ago, as 500 Mbps and then 1000 Mbps devices arrived. The price of 1000 Mbps devices has come down to levels that make it silly to contemplate buying 200 Mbps plugs, if you can find some. But the choice is yours.
Fortunately, 200 Mbps plugs are AV compliant and will work with 500 and 1000 plugs, albeit at the speed of the slower devices.
