What is the maximum throughput for powerline adapters?

[eeguy]

Hi, these adapters use the electric power line to communicate. In a condo environment in the USA and Canada, what is the maximum practical communication speed that they can use?

[djacobow]

The standard goes to 1 GB/s, but is you're thinking about this, that's probably the wrong question.

The actually throughout is specific to your situation, and the range is 0 b/s to 1 GB/s. There are so many factors. It's a neat technology when it works, but often enough it just doesn't.

[ejeffrey]

Power line networking is a bit like wireless in that there are a number of different data rates available and they will be chosen not just on endpoint availability but on the signal environment.  I used to use it and regularly got hundreds of megabits of actual throughput from a pair of 1 Gb/s adapters but then moved one endpoint to another room and got way less even though it stayed on the same phase.

An apartment will be harder because you may have three phase instead of split phase power so only a 1 in 3 chance of two random outlets being the same phase, and you likely have many customers on the same step down transformer meaning you are more likely to get interference from your neighbors than a typical single family home with their own pole mount transformer.  The only way to tell is to try it out.

[wasedadoc]

Powerline adaptors are the work of the devil.  That technology should have been strangled at birth by the FCC and equivalent bodies worldwide.

[brucehoult]

You can easily get several hundred Mbps from one end of a large house to the other. Faster than your internet connection unless you've got a high end fibre plan.

[tooki]

I could barely get anything from one end of my apartment (a sprawling 1 bedroom estate) to the other using powerline networking, thanks to the living room (where the modem is) and bedroom (where my desk is) being on different phases.

But more tellingly, even a test with the two things plugged into the same wall outlet resulted in performance far below the claims. If they can’t deliver anything close to their promised bandwidth over a distance of under 1 meter, I declare it crap. And having since learned that they are EMI nightmares, I actually tend to agree that they should probably have never been allowed.

I then replaced the (useless to me) analog phone wire with CAT 6 or 7, replaced the wall plates with RJ-45 jacks in keystone plates, and ran the remaining patch cable under the baseboards and around door frames using that extra flat CAT 5 cable, and now I have flawless gigabit between the rooms, more than enough for my 600Mbps internet.

Amusingly, I actually do need two Wi-Fi routers for my “estate” because its layout puts two heavy masonry walls, plus all the kitchen appliances, in between the living room and bedroom, enough to severely impact Wi-Fi, especially if the microwave oven is on, since it’s right in the path. So each wing of my apartment has its own access point.

[brucehoult]

I could barely get anything from one end of my apartment (a sprawling 1 bedroom estate) to the other using powerline networking, thanks to the living room (where the modem is) and bedroom (where my desk is) being on different phases.

I'm surprised it worked at all. It's not supposed to.

But more tellingly, even a test with the two things plugged into the same wall outlet resulted in performance far below the claims. If they can’t deliver anything close to their promised bandwidth over a distance of under 1 meter, I declare it crap.

What model WIFI router do you have? What is the rated speed? What is your actual speed?

I bet the powerline unit ratio is no worse, and probably better.

These specs are the raw bit rate, under ideal conditions. If the conditions you give it are not ideal then it will step down to a lower raw bit rate. But whatever the raw bit rate is, you'll get less throughput because of layers of bit-stuffing, checksums, forward error correction or whatever.

Serial ports never give more than 73% of their bit rate. Ethernet gets maybe 85% I guess. Original WIFI gave up to about 40% of the bit rate, but modern 1+ Gbps WIFI gives actual speeds of maybe 15% to 20% of the raw bit rate.