bobpeers -> blog

My Homeplug units arrived on Friday so I’ve tried them out over the last 24 hours. Before I go any further the bottom line is that they’re great in theory, easy to use but the performance is terrible, at least in my flat, YMMV.

My units are the Devolo dLAN 200 AVeasy Powerline Starter Kit. One unit was connected to my router and the other unit to my laptop which I moved around my flat to test the results in different locations. I was aware that they should be connected directly into a wall socket and not through an extension and after testing this is certainly true. From the advertising they claim 200 Mbps but having read some reviews I knew that around 80 Mbps was more realistic.

In summary my connection bandwidth varied from 4 (yes 4) Mbps to 40 Mbps with most locations around 9-12 Mbps, nowhere near good enough for their advertised purpose (streaming HD video). I was not trying to steam video but I really wanted to connect to my NAS box and use it as fast remote storage, but the prospect of copying 1GB Linux iso files over a connection at 10 Mbps is not something I look forward to.

On the plus side they are very easy to use, the units found each other every time within a few seconds, there was no setting up and the connection was reliable. If you were buying them to share a 2 Mbps internet connection and not using a LAN then they would probably satisfy your needs.

I’ve summarised my connection bandwidth below. I should explain that half my flat has very new wiring (2 years old) and my fuse box is also new but the other side of my flat has very old wiring, maybe 50 years+. The unit connected to the router was always in the newly wired side.

All the measurements were made copying a 690MB file from my NAS box to my laptop.

From here it can be seen that ftp is always faster than cifs, no surprise there, but the actual bandwidths are all pretty bad in my opinion. Even when I used my laptop in the same room as my router, about 4 metres of wire apart from each other I still couldn’t get over 20 Mbps over cifs or 40 Mbps over ftp.

If the bandwidth never gets greater than that in near ideal condition (new wiring, same room) then they’re not much use for anything in the real world. Of course your results may differ but it’s a large investment for something that has a such a large performance drop off and you have no idea how it will perform until you try it in your home.

Needless to say I’ll be returning the units and spending my money on something more worthwhile, plus probably wiring my flat with Ethernet cable until a better solution comes along.

After getting my internet connection back I’ve returned to my old problem with my laptop. It’s a bit long in the tooth now and although it works fine the wireless is the old 802.11b standard (the original Centrino) so on my home network I’m limited to about 4 Mbps on a good day. Since my Internet connection now runs at 25Mbps this creates an annoying bottleneck in my network.

The other problem is that due to my routers location it’s not so easy to just run an Ethernet cable to my laptop. To solve this in the short term until I upgrade to 802.11n I thought about buying a Homeplug / Powerline system.

After some research it seems the Netgear HDXB101 or Devolo dLAN 200 AVeasy units seem like a good buy. They claim up to 200Mbps but from reviews it sees that 40-50 Mbps is more realistic even under ideal conditions. It also seems that using a power extension affects performance markedly, plus old wiring is not so good. Unfortunately one side of my flat has brand new wiring while the other side is about 100 years old!

Of the two I prefer the Devolo units, partly from reading this PC Pro review but also because they actually advertise Linux support and have Linux drivers available for download from their website. Of course they are also more expensive but I’m willing to pay extra for a product that actively promotes Linux compatibility in their products.

None of this would put me off too much if it wasn’t for the cost. In Denmark the cheapest I can buy a pack of two for is about 950 DKK (about 200 USD), which I think is pretty steep given that new draft-n wireless routers can be bought for less than this plus the technology is not that new.

I might just have to bite the bullet and buy some, but it’s a big risk not knowing what performance they will deliver.