• Wooly@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Do people not know power line ethernet adapters are a thing? Look if up on Amazon, you just plug one into the wall by your router and one next to your PC. Clean and strong connections.

    • BURN@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There’s a few caveats to this. I had a good set of powerline adapters that still ended up with worse performance than a usb wireless dongle.

      If the outlets are in different circuits or you have a house with old wiring there’s a good chance they won’t work

      • Wooly@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Granted I’ve only used it in 2/3 houses but they’ve always given me the best speed, at least in the past 5-10 years. They used to be much worse if you’re basing this on old experience. And also the oldest house I used them in only got 2MBps so it wasn’t exactly hard for them to get to top speed. My current place isn’t exactly new wiring and the copper cables still get my max speed of 11MBps.

        Yeah you won’t get the full experience of gigabit connection through copper wall cables but I’ve never lived in a place with fast enough WiFi for that to matter. I much prefer a cable free house, I have a power cable going to my server in a cupboard and I really hate it, wish there was a power socket in there.

        • suodrazah@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          That’s fine if you’re simply trying to max out your net, but for large internal file transfers EoP are a nuisance vs GbE.

        • V4uban@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Depending on the model, and your electric network, you might get some disconnects though. Had that at my parents years ago, ended up doing exactly what the meme is

    • Reken@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      From my experience, power line adapters are very hit or miss depending on your house setup. I’ve had power line adapters that couldn’t even get above 10 Mbps. I feel like the next best thing besides just straight up Ethernet cables is something called MoCA adapters. They use the already existing (in most houses) coax cables, which allow for much higher throughput and very consistent connection. I’ve had peaks of 850-900 Mbps with 10ms latency using MoCA adapters.

      • money_loo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yep. Got one transferring 1 gig fiber between floors, and the upstairs regularly gets full speed through it. Highly recommended if you can do it.

    • stevestevesteve@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This is as dumb as asking if people don’t know wifi exists. Yeah, pretty much everyone knows, but it has substantial tradeoffs to just running a long cat6 cable, one of which likely is plain cost.

      • money_loo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Just be careful, they can be pretty expensive and often way way slower than advertised.

        The main reasons I use them are places you lack WiFi coverage, where reliability is more important than speed.

        • kungfusion@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          I’m guessing Ethernet would be transmitted over the electrical wiring? if that’s the case, if your house have different circuits it wouldn’t work?

          • money_loo@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            It actually CAN work across circuits, I believe, but it’s significantly degraded. Like 5-10 Mbps bad.

    • Veltoss@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      What in tarnation is this black magic? I don’t know how I’ve never heard of these before.

      • money_loo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        If your house is wired for cable and you’re not using it, they also have MOCA which is way way better.

        Coax cables are wicked fast and you can use them alongside network switches to get LAN all sorts of places you’d normally have issues.

      • Wooly@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        They’re good/reliable enough that it’s worth the £20-30 to try a set out. Although like another guy commented bad wall wiring can sometimes have effects if your router is really fast, I get my full 11MBps through my walls easily enough in relatively old housing.

        • stevestevesteve@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          11mbps, even if that’s megabytes not bits, is pretty fuckin slow as far as network speeds today. That’s either 1/100th or 1/10th of gigabit speeds, and a good Ethernet cable can provide well over gigE nowadays

          • Wooly@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yeah, it’s an old house and I’m not paying for gigabit internet because whenever I have I’ve literally never gotten the advertised speeds. I’m sure it’s good enough for 99% of people, I have the best internet of all my friends lol. But yeah, you won’t get the full gigabit speeds through copper wires if that’s what you can get from your router in other ways.

            Pretty sure nowhere apart from ugly new builds and student housing really gets modern internet speeds in the UK. I got one dude who’s still in the same city as me on like 10mb/s. My other friend just bought unlimited 4g because it’s better than their shit WiFi.

          • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Which only really matters if your actual internet connection can do the same.

            Or in other words, it depends, so each one should try to get the right solution for their situation.

            • stevestevesteve@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I didn’t realize that the only thing people used network connections for was Internet connections. Wow thanks for letting me know.

              Lots of ISPs offer way more than 100mbps, many places offer past 1gbps. Even if they don’t, there are many LAN-based things that run even if you don’t know they do. P2p software updates are widespread now. So yeah “it depends” on whether you care about a fast and stable network connection.

              Not to mention, power line is a shared medium, much like wifi, so if you have two computers, kiss even your already slow speeds goodbye

              • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                First, I suggest you read the last 12 words of my post rather than reacting to your own interpretation of my comment as a personal dig at you.

                Second, Ethernel over Power sharing is only up to the first circuit breaker, whislt WiFi sharing is only limited by metal surfaces, walls and distance.

                This means that in some situations (for example appartments in appartment buildings) EoP “sharing” is entirelly dependent on what devices a person puts on the same electrical network (i.e. the power line branch sharing the same circuit breaker) whilst WiFi is a complete total hellhole of everybody screwing everybody else.

                Further, people sometimes rent the place they live in, not own it and getting permission to run wire along the walls might be impossible whilst investing in improving the landlord’s property by having wire run within the existing paths inside the wall (usually shared with power wire) is usually not exactly smart.

                So Ethernet Over Power is a possible solution that should be considered in light of the situation and used if appropriate or discarded if not.

                Looking at and evaluating the various solutions in light of the context is the Engineering approach to solving problems, so it makes sense to present a possible solution in a public forum when one’s intention is to help others.

                A self-centred “it’s not good in my situation hence it’s shit and anybody who says otherwise is insulting me” take does nothing to help others.

                • stevestevesteve@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  My original comment was about how slow Ethernet over power was and you claimed that only matters if your internet is faster. There are lots of situations where you’d run cable where that statement isn’t true. If you had said “sure it’s slower but it still works sometimes” that’s a wildly different statement than the equivalent of “speed only matters if it’s the bottleneck to the internet”

                  Power line adapters are usually fairly separated by different circuits, but that’s far from a hard limit. Just because there’s not a reliable connection between two circuits doesn’t mean the medium isn’t shared and interference can’t happen - it is very much like wifi through a cement wall or two.

                  In no way am I personally offended, I just used some sarcasm to show how inane that original statement is; and those kind of statements are everywhere in networking discussions.