Question Problems setting up access point

daftpunk1

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I was able to set up a bt home hub 3 as an access point in my own house with a hub4 as my main router, I had a ethernet cable run between them. No issues

A friend asked me to do the same in his house but with a few differences but i still feel it should be doable. He is on fibre plusnet and wants to use a hub5 as an access point. And he has no ethernet cable run so must use power line adaptors.

I have everything set up and running but the broadband speed off the hub5 access point is terrible, about half a meg, yet when i connect to the main fibre plus net hub its nearly 30 megs.

So I started eliminating things, i took the power line adaptors out and connected the hubs using just an ethenet cable.

Connection on both hubs is perfect. So the issue is the powerlines obviously. Im using d link 500 meg adaptors.

Are these sufficient? Is it the fact the main hub has fibre and that speed can't be put across. No clue what to do as power lines is the only way to connect the two...
 
Powerline adapters can be problematic and are not guaranteed to well (or at all) in some situations. It might be the adapaters are on separate circuits and he signal is being reduced via the switch heat/connections through the consumer unit. It it could be electrical noise/interference on the mains swamping the signal.

Try the adapters in sockets in the same room to see how well they work locally, and if they perform well you can try moving one adapter further away room by room until you start to get connection problems. This might allow you to place the second router in a different area but still get reasonable wifi performance.

However do note that in some cases powerline adapters just cannot cope so a different solution needs to be found.
 
Powerline adaptors (HPAs)are the devils spawn. Years ago, amateur radio bods discovered that a single powerline plug could drown out the entire HF spectrum; poorly - if at all - filtered, not notched, and OFCOM were unwilling to do anything about it, despite being a clear breach of the EMC regulations.

My own experience is that they can also interfere with ADSL/VDSL signalling. Adding an HPA plug here reduced ADSL sync speed from 17Mbit to 10Mbit, and actual IP throughput down to about 6Mbit. Removing the HPA restored normal service. With fibre, it knocked the connection out.

BT's kit was amongst the worst offenders, and although BT promised to install notch filters, the situation with their kit still isnt great. Netgear, Devolo, TP-Link, are all equally bad.

Bear in mind that HPA works at half the stated speed; a 500mbit connection is not 500mbit, it is 250mbit each way, and is a simplex connection; only one side can transmit at a time. It is effectively the equivalent of a 1980's ethernet hub network, and the more devices on the HPA network, the lower the average throughput of the network; each client WILL use the network, even when idle, due to the nature of operating systems (the odd DNS request, background service chatter, applications "phoning home", etc).

I'd strongly urge you to ditch the HPAs, and run flat VAT6 ethernet cable from hub to hub. Flat cable can be run under carpets, between carpet and skirting board, etc, and is cheap as chips.
 
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Bear in mind that HPA works at half the stated speed; a 500mbit connection is not 500mbit, it is 250mbit each way, and is a simplex connection;...

I'm afraid that is not quote correct - it is not "250mbps in each direction" - it is a contended medium access as subsequently described a la early versions of ethernet - there's no sense of "fairness" in that everything gets and equal share of the bandwidth. It's quite possible for a "chatty" plug (or device downstream thereof) to monopolise the channel - it was (and still is) a vice of "common access" mediums such as HPA, Wi-Fi and early hub & BNC based ethernet.

Also, HPA (& Wi-Fi incidentally) is "Half-Duplex" rather than "Simplex" - Simplex is a channel that only "flows" in one direction such as UHF TV, FM radio, Satellite TV and so forth. [/PEDANT]

However, I agree with the central theme of your argument - if fast reliable data networking is required, switched ethernet over UTP is the way to go.
 
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I sit corrected Mick :)

It's been decades since I've even thought about simplex, and half-duplex is what I meant! I'm blaming it on age, I became officially 'old' last Friday ;)
 
@mickevh Do you have a copy of the IEEE1901 standard, or definitive link to hpa av2 data rates? The actual line rate of hpa seems to be a mystery, nothing at all on the net, an the ieee library is subscription only.

Reason for asking I see that my interest has been piqued. From what I can gather, some manufacturers ARE providing a headline figure that is the sum of the bidirectional rates, i.e. Netgear's FAQs explicitly state that the headline rate is actually the sum of rx/tx in the same way that Fast Ethernet is 'actually' 200mbit.

All I can find is a vague reference to HPA av2 using 320mbit (which would give 640 marketing megabits), and using 2 of the three lines, each at 320mbit, would give 1200 marketing megabits...

Apologies to OP.
 
I don't have access to the standards, (and I don't have any HPA so my interest in them is largely academic,) however I do have a fairly technical White Paper published by the HomePlug Alliance (link following or Google "HomePlug White Paper" if the link goes dead.) It's a bit old now, (circa 2005,) but one would presume most of the basic principals still hold.

http://www.homeplug.org/media/filer...aa82-179e6e95cab5/hpav-white-paper_050818.pdf
 
It's been decades since I've even thought about simplex, and half-duplex is what I meant! I'm blaming it on age, I became officially 'old' last Friday ;)

Me too - I'm due at a "30 year(ish)" college reunion later this year. Where did that life go. :D
 

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