PLP1200 Dropping LAN & Internet Connection

Bought these about 3 weeks ago to replace my reliable but ageing and a little slow Western Digital Livewire Powerline Hubs (200 Mpbs). Never had any trouble with the WD Livewires, just wanted something fast these days to keep up with fibre internet which was being bottlenecked by the Livewire’s for my upstairs PC’s.

The problem is that every now and then the PLP1200 devices cause the internet connection (and therefore LAN connection) to downstairs to be dropped.

My setup is 50Mb fibre connection downstairs with Ethernet cabling (Cat 6) through to PLP1200 socket to upstairs PLP1200 then Ethernet again to my main PC and NAS via a Netgear 1Gb switch. Measuring with “Tamos Throughput Tester 1.0 Build 28” from my upstairs PC to one downstairs, with the Livewires I used to get around 30-45 Mbps but with the new PLP1200’s I am now getting around 90 Mpbs which is a nice increase (when it’s working).

PC-to-PC LAN testing software here:

http://www.tamos.com/products/throughput-test/)

When the connection is dropped, if I look at the PLP1200 lights all three are lit green yet my LAN card reports ‘No Internet Connection’ and similarly my downstairs machines are gone from the Network browser. I have two Marvell Yukon 88E8056 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controllers on my ASUS motherboard and I have tried using both to eliminate a fault in the one of the cards but they are seem to be fine. Like I said earlier, when I was using the WD Livewire’s I never had any such issue, its only started happening when I installed the new Netgear devices and retired the Livewire’s.

I have discovered I can force a fix for the problem by turning the PLP1200’s off and on again. Alternatively a slightly quicker solution is to open the Network Adapter settings then disable the adaptor currently being used, give it a minute, then re-enable the adapter and it then seems to restore the LAN connection through the PLP1200’s.

A pattern I have noticed is that I can play something like Mechwarrior Online for an hour or two and the LAN connection doesn’t seem to drop. Similarly, if I do an iMac Time Machine backup from the wife’s machine that will happily complete over an hour or two (10’s of GB )after going through the steps of: wireless -> wifi/router -> ethernet -> PLP1200 -> PLP1200 -> 1Gb switch -> NAS. However, if I do something a lot less network intensive such as browsing the internet via Chrome or Firefox for a short space of time (at a guess at least 10 minutes) I’ll suddenly get a web page error “No Internet Connection”. It’s almost like there isn’t enough network traffic bashing the PLP1200’s to keep the powerline connection open and they have dozed off – yet the lights don’t indicate they have gone into sleep mode or anything!

Anyone else getting similar issues?

I would assume there is some fault in the network traffic monitoring that is indeed putting the devices into a sleep mode incorrectly and similarly not indicating as such visually. I would hope a firmware update could resolve this – similarly some control/admin software to disable any ‘sleep’ mode might help too.