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sabregen
Fully [H]
- Joined
- Jun 6, 2005
- Messages
- 19,501
This has also been posted in the original FP thread, here:http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1429729&highlight=gigabit+powerline
Well I bit. I read the kotaku release on Monday, and was instant intrigued. The computer room is upstairs on the front end of the house, and the living room where we do all of our movie watching is on the lower level, at the back end of the house. The upstairs and the downstairs share no common walls. The house was bought new in October of 2007. I don't mind taking on jobs around the house, and am comfortable doing wiring work, but the easiest solution would have been to run external wiring. Sadly, our home owners association prevents this.
Finally sold (since wiring internal to the house structure is very likely above my skill level) on powerline networking as a possible solution (after trying both ICS on a spare laptop, hooked to the x360 downstairs, acting as a bridge, and a buffalo router with DD-WRT on it, and a high gain antenna...both of which were terrible solutions), I went ot BB today, with some RewardZone certs in hand. I went to the PowerLine networking section, and there was ONE box of these, amongst many other 85mbps and 200mbps products from other vendors. I picked these up, over the others rated slower, at the same price.
let me be clear. I have bought multiple Belkin networking products in the past, and was dissatisfied with all of them, and returned all of them. Maybe it's because I have no previous experience with powerline networking, no basis for comparison, and am just entirely fed up with the wireless bridge situation. That being said, I was able to stream (flawlessly, with less than 10seconds initial buffering) a 1080p .MKV and a 1080p .MP4 over the powerline kit, from my server upstairs to two laptops hooked into a GbE switch, simultaneously.
Status light on the unit are as follows:
Power: Blue
Powerline network: Orange
Ethernet: Blue
This indicates that although I've got good power, and Ethernet shows GbE speed, the powerline network is sync'ing at sub 200mb/sec speed.
Ping tests from the laptops showed near identical results (within margin of error):
www.google.com - 80-85ms
to upstairs pcs (various) - 1-3ms
to router upstairs - sub 2ms
network file transfer (only 1 done so far) was a 1.4gb .mkv file in 6 minutes.
I have not yet tested outlets in the same room, as of yet, or other rooms upstairs, or otherwise possibly on the same breaker, to test powerline sync speeds higher than 200mb/sec. I also have not done more than one file transfer. I plan to do more testing, but have not yet.
I have already watched Wall-E and am now watching Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, with the wife. Up until this powerline kit, XBoX Live!, and Netflix Watch it Now were always done upstairs in the computer room, not downstairs on the couch.
In the end, it may not be gigabit, ethernet would be better, and cheaper, as well. I would not be inclined to run critical NFS, NAS, or iSCSI over it, VMotion, or anything like that...but so far, I think it's worth it.
More tests to come.
Well I bit. I read the kotaku release on Monday, and was instant intrigued. The computer room is upstairs on the front end of the house, and the living room where we do all of our movie watching is on the lower level, at the back end of the house. The upstairs and the downstairs share no common walls. The house was bought new in October of 2007. I don't mind taking on jobs around the house, and am comfortable doing wiring work, but the easiest solution would have been to run external wiring. Sadly, our home owners association prevents this.
Finally sold (since wiring internal to the house structure is very likely above my skill level) on powerline networking as a possible solution (after trying both ICS on a spare laptop, hooked to the x360 downstairs, acting as a bridge, and a buffalo router with DD-WRT on it, and a high gain antenna...both of which were terrible solutions), I went ot BB today, with some RewardZone certs in hand. I went to the PowerLine networking section, and there was ONE box of these, amongst many other 85mbps and 200mbps products from other vendors. I picked these up, over the others rated slower, at the same price.
let me be clear. I have bought multiple Belkin networking products in the past, and was dissatisfied with all of them, and returned all of them. Maybe it's because I have no previous experience with powerline networking, no basis for comparison, and am just entirely fed up with the wireless bridge situation. That being said, I was able to stream (flawlessly, with less than 10seconds initial buffering) a 1080p .MKV and a 1080p .MP4 over the powerline kit, from my server upstairs to two laptops hooked into a GbE switch, simultaneously.
Status light on the unit are as follows:
Power: Blue
Powerline network: Orange
Ethernet: Blue
This indicates that although I've got good power, and Ethernet shows GbE speed, the powerline network is sync'ing at sub 200mb/sec speed.
Ping tests from the laptops showed near identical results (within margin of error):
www.google.com - 80-85ms
to upstairs pcs (various) - 1-3ms
to router upstairs - sub 2ms
network file transfer (only 1 done so far) was a 1.4gb .mkv file in 6 minutes.
I have not yet tested outlets in the same room, as of yet, or other rooms upstairs, or otherwise possibly on the same breaker, to test powerline sync speeds higher than 200mb/sec. I also have not done more than one file transfer. I plan to do more testing, but have not yet.
I have already watched Wall-E and am now watching Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, with the wife. Up until this powerline kit, XBoX Live!, and Netflix Watch it Now were always done upstairs in the computer room, not downstairs on the couch.
In the end, it may not be gigabit, ethernet would be better, and cheaper, as well. I would not be inclined to run critical NFS, NAS, or iSCSI over it, VMotion, or anything like that...but so far, I think it's worth it.
More tests to come.
