Your experience with homeplugs/Powerline etc

In general they only get 100mbit/s under ideal circumstances i.e. both sockets relatively close by and on the same circuit and no interference.

The reality is that household wiring is far from ideal for carrying signals. It's big chunky copper cable, wired through fairly crude terminals and designed to deliver 230V power, not signals. Nose may feed back into the circuits from appliances and all sorts of things. Most homes have a plethora switch mode power supplies in portable appliances (e.g. your mobile phone plug), small appliances like satellite boxes, radios, cd players, lighting systems, fluorescent tubes, etc. Things like washing machine motors are now normally electronically controlled too, which can mean that there could be strange interference feeding back into your power lines.

Power wiring is also totally unshielded, i.e. it's just wrapped in two layers of PVC.

All in all, it's amazing HomePlugs work at all !

vibe666 wrote: »

not sure exactly what i have, but i'm in a 10yr old 4 bed semi outside navan and all the downstairs sockets are run off a single fuse and upstairs off another, same with up & down lights and the 85mbps homeplugs were okayish downstairs, but crossing the fusebox to reach upstairs killed the transfer speeds on mine, so i just assumed that was what was meant by a ring main, but maybe not.

Basically, if they're 32A breakers / fuses feeding the sockets then they're rings.
Rings are permitted in Ireland, they're just much less commonly used than they are in the UK. Irish wiring practices prefer radials. This is partially because we originally used German/Northern European style "Schuko" 16amp plugs and sockets and Diazed fuses (the bottle-shape cartridge fuses) which were never used in the UK. Britian used a rather crude rewirable fuse, which is why you will hear English people talking about "mending a fuse" rather than "changing a fuse". You literally cut a length of fuse wire and connect it between two terminals on a fuse carrier on old UK wiring!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_circuit

If they're 16A or 20A breakers / fuses then they're radials.

Radial circuit: (as typically found in most Irish homes)

HomePlug actually sends the signal over the neutral anyway so it does not pass through the fuses or breakers. The neutrals in Irish wiring (or most wiring) are not fused they're just all ultimately connected back to a neutral bar on the fuse box.

Typical Irish wiring will have the live and neutral passing through a single RCD (used to be known as an ELCB). This detects any difference between the current flowing on the live and neutral wires and cuts the power to the circuit if the difference is more than a preset value, usually 30mA. This is what trips if you get any leakage to earth e.g. your kettle terminals are wet, or you touch a live wire. It prevents electric shock / death.

After the RCD, each circuit goes through a MCB (Mini-Circuit Breaker) or fuse which provides the over current protection i.e. these have a preset value in amps and will blow/trip if the current flowing through the circuit is higher than that value. This prevents the wires in the walls from overheating and catching fire. It will also trip if there is a straight neutral-live short circuit. Finally, the fuse in the plug protects the appliance cord (and, possibly the wiring in the appliance) from overloading and going on fire.
If you're using rings, this is the only protection for this and it is why they advise that you NEVER connect a European 2-pin plug directly to a UK/Irish socket without a fused adapter.

Whether these are 16amp or 20amp radials, or 32A rings or anything else, they are only on the LIVE side of the circuit. All the neutrals are ultimately connected together and back to the RCD.

However, if you have multiple RCDs e.g. for different floors, RCBOs (combined RCD/MCB) on every circuit or if you have RCD sockets, it's possible that this could cause issues with the power-line networking signals as the neutral has to pass through a coil on the way back.

What's more likely to make differences is the length of the cables really and the complexity of the layout.

Sponge Bob wrote: »

AN ELCB is not an RCCB Solair. It detects earth leakage from a fault and trips.

A combi will detect either earth leakage or residual current and will trip. You can have a combi on a ring if you wish.

There is a neeutral bus bar per ROW of trips so if you gotta cross rows there is an issue with bandwidth.

I was using the term ELCB, as they are often still labelled as such on older panels, even though in many instances they are actually IEC-defined RCDs. There were older (obsolete) voltage operated ELCBs which detected voltage on the earth wire and tripped, but the terminology clung on in the 1970s, 80s and long after manufacturers had stopped using the term ELCB, electricians continued to describe it as such and write it on panels.

Many people will still recognise ELCB and won't have a clue what an RCD is. The terminology is all far too confusing i.e. MCB vs RCD vs RCBO. It'd be far easier as Circuit Breaker, Earth Fault Detector, Combined Earth Fault Detector + Circuit Breaker.

As for the signal transmission on the household wiring; the complexity of the neutrals, the size of the premises and 'noisy' devices are most definitely the problem.

In general power-line networking's ok, but it's not great if you want very high speed rock solid networks. It's kinda handy though if you're stuck with poor WiFi penetration in part of your house / office and don't fancy running cables.

We were using a homeplug network for that, but in the end I put the WiFi router into the attic which made all the difference as it penetrates ceilings (plaster board) and floors (wood) much more readily than it will penetrate concrete / block internal walls.

New homes should be fully wired for Ethernet though. It's actually in the building regulations in France now! We missed a huge opportunity during the building boom by not making buildings and housing developments 100% broadband friendly i.e. properly wired homes with CAT6 Ethernet points in every room and decent underground neutral duct networks for carrying cables / fibres.

Sadly, it's all too late now as there's so little construction happening and we've everything built!

Also, the other drawback of power-line networking is that it can produce RF signals as electrical wiring is totally unshielded. You get a lot of complaints about it in the UK as BT is handing out power line adapters to everyone who gets their homehub + TV and there are a lot of radio HAMs in the UK who will complain to Ofcom about such things!

There were some experiments with using ESB lines to carry broadband direct to home but it seems they were deemed impractical. There's nothing to stop ESB from clipping fibres to power lines though or pushing them through ducts in housing estates.

Sponge Bob wrote: »

There is no way on earth that Powerline should ever be used outdoors, even indoors it should be 'notched' ( off) in certain frequency bands but cheap Homeplug adapters do not have the filters to do the notching and no standards are enforced.

And if you think Ofcom are bad Comreg are beyond caring about anything.

Yeah, I agree. At least the French had the good sense to predict that people would need a lot of bandwidth in their homes and started to implement a requirement that all major rooms in a house have data wiring. You now basically have a 'cofret de communication' installed along side your electrical distribution panel 'cofret electrique'

Typical installation : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBpJm6-YHBY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fznrjae2o90 (promo video)

Sponge Bob wrote: »

I installed CatV in my brand new semi in 1997 excepting that the Cofret was the attic Had I waited for official Ireland I would still be outside the door of a morning sniffing the air for a satellite signal with my nose of course.

Well, given that the same "official Ireland" let property developers exclude Eircom and the local cable company from apartment buildings and other developments and inflict their own home-brew, usually overpriced, "broad"band network on them, I'd say you'd have been waiting alright!

Much of "official Ireland" still sees telecommunications like this, in my experience of them :





We have a 1970s house, but it had been wired for telephone in most rooms. The phone cables all ran back to the attic via ducts, so it was just a matter of carefully pushing Ethernet cables back through the same ducts and installing a router in the attic. We even managed to get double coaxial cable down to a few rooms as well as cat6 as the ducts were pretty generously oversized and we kept the old telephone wiring too. So, from one point you can get analogue telephone on RJ11, RJ45 Ethernet & 2 LNB sat

Whole thing goes back to the attic.

We had fun though when a Sky installer basically wanted to ignore the internal wiring entirely and was insisting that he had to install cables directly through my front wall and to the sky box rather than to the internal wiring

UPC were similarly idiotic when the eventually did show up with digital cable + BB in the area.
The installer kept insisting that he wasn't allowed to walk in a floored attic which has a stairs for access!

bk wrote: »

FYI There wasn't much point in keeping the old telephone wire in place, you could also replace it with Cat 5e.

A single Cat 5e cable can be used for 4 separate phone lines or 2 phone line + 100Mb/s ethernet.

A Cat 5e cable has 8 cables in 4 pairs. Each phone line only uses one pair, 100Mb ethernet uses 2 pairs and gigabit ethernet uses 4 pairs.

It was more difficult to pull it out than keep it in Ever tried pulling open twisted pair 1970s solid core telephone cable through a duct!? It will hardly bend!

My own experience with every Belkin networking product I've ever come across has been dire. What speed are you getting through them and hows the latency between them? 30mbit is plenty to stream 1080p HD but most wireless and powerline fails to achieve this, therefore its always best and futureproof to run a cat5 cable. If you're not streaming media now, the day will come when you'll want to.