Upgrading & Fixing my powerline adaptors

Introduction

As many of my long-time readers will know. I use the TP-Link powerline adaptors in my home to distribute my wired ethernet traffic around my home. If you haven’t done so already, I recommend checking out this blog post first: TP-Link powerline adaptors.

As I mentioned in my last post about them. I think powerline adaptors are a last resort and do give a good experience overall, but can never compare or stand up to the benefits of running a cable.

What I currently have

I currently have 4 of the AV1000 adapters from TP-Link. These boast an up to 1000mbps over the power line, depending on your mains cabling. At the time of purchasing these, I remember being very impressed that you could now run full gigabyte over powerline. When I first looked at the technology, you could only run 200mbps over the powerline.

Below is a drawing of how I currently have my home network layed out:

Here you can see how I have my 4 adapters connected.

The problems

I currently am facing two main issues. The first is that ether the Kitchen or Landing adapters experience problems dropping out and have to regularly be rebooted to establish a connection again. The second issue is that the TV adapter gets a very slow speed to the kitchen where the router is plugged in. This is a speed of around 100mbps, but seems to have quite a lot of latency. However, the other adapters experience a good speed over over 300mps. Not quite the 1gpbs advertised, but still over 100mbps, so I am not upset about this speed.

The issue with two of the adapters dropping out, is a complete mystery to me. This is an issue that seems to have developed recently and I did not have this problem when I installed them over a year ago. I have checked the firmware is still the latest and even tried repairing all the adapters in my house and still I get the same issue.

The issue with the bad speed to the TV is quite an easy problem to diagnose. In my house I have two ring-mains. These are drawn in the drawing below:

See how the kitchen is on a different ring-main? My assumption is that the Kitchen and the TV adapters are so far away and on different cabling, that they have the longest route to transmit and receive data. To resolve this, I could move the kitchen adapter into the hallway, that is on the same ring. The problem with this is that I have a single 13A socket in my hallway. This currently has an extension lead connected to it, that has my BT modem and my doorbell powered from it. powerline adapters do not like extension leads, they need to be connected directly to a socket.

Solution

Installation

When the new adapters arrived, I replaced them one at a time. Pairing them to my existing AV1000 network and eventually. I had only the AV2000s left. The process is flawless as you can swap them out in seconds. However, you do have to keep walking back and forth between one that is already on the network. The pairing process consists of pressing the pairing button on the new adapter and then pressing the pairing button on one of the existing ones.

Experience

After upgrading my adapters and moving one from the kitchen to the hallway. I noticed that I had a speed boost. Using the tpPLC software. I had about 300mbps average with the exception of the TV adapter that got just over 100mbps. But after replacing. I get just over 1Gbps. Not quite the 2Gbps advertised, but I think the loss is down to my house wiring not the adapters.

Conclusion

I think the upgrade has been very beneficial. I am now happy that I can fully utilize a 1Gbps connection over the powerline. This combined with the WiFi 6 from my dream router, I can now get a decent speed between my MacBook (on wifi) and my server.

It is slightly disappointing that I can’t get 1Gbps to the TV switch, but I still have a better speed than I had before.

AV2000, line, power, power-line, powerline, tp, TP-Link

Hardware, Networking, Tech

January 31, 2023