OT: whole home wifi mesh recommendations

[David Fylstra]

Hi Dee Dee,

Running Ethernet cable inside walls can be challenging, and the hardest part is finding a path between the floors of a 2-story house. Powerline (HomePlug AV2) can be an attractive solution, especially for uplinking, e.g., your first-floor LAN to the Wi-Fi router on the second-floor LAN. I used HomePlug adapters to connect the floors in my house this way for several years, before I finally bit the bullet and installed Ethernet everywhere. It actually does work pretty well, and the adapters convert RJ-45 Ethernet into powerline frames and vice versa to bridge between two locations.

HomePlug (HP) can best be thought of as running Wi-Fi modulated on your AC powerline. Like Wi-Fi, HomePlug uses Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) to arbitrate access to the shared channel by all HP devices. Thus, the more HP devices on your AC powerline, the more contention for “airtime”. Newer versions of HP use many of the same clever techniques that Wi-Fi uses to increase throughput, like adaptive OFDM modulation rates and MIMO. 

Like Wi-Fi, HP is susceptible to noise on the channel, which can degrade throughput. In this respect it is much like X-10, with which we all have a lot of experience. If you have noisy motors, surge suppressors, or even noise coming through the pole transformer from your neighbor, your throughput may suffer.

Also like Wi-Fi, the advertised link speed (1000 Mbps in the case of the TP-Link Powerline Wi-Fi Extender) is just the PHY rate, i.e., the speed at which a single frame is transmitted. The actual throughput, after resolving contention, and after adding IP and TCP overhead, will be much less, just as with Wi-Fi rates.

Be careful about security. The frames are encrypted with 128-bit AES, but on older HP systems there was a network-wide default password set by the device manufacturer. I bought a pair of Netgear powerline adapters when they first came out and the default network password was “HomePlug”!  You had to use a Windows-only utility to change it. If you didn’t change it, your neighbor (sharing the same transformer as you) could actually eavesdrop on your powerline network with their own HP adapters. Newer generations of HP are sometimes paired at the factory with unique passwords, but I would check to make sure.

Last and most unexpected, IIRC, I was actually able to run HomePlug and X-10 on the same AC powerline in my house! This was more than a decade ago, and my poor brain is reconstructing this memory from thin air. But I’m pretty sure that I checked and the carrier frequencies were different enough between HomePlug and X-10 that they didn’t interfere with each other. Having said that, the newer HP standards like HomePlug AV2 may not be so interference-friendly. YMMV, etc.

Check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug> for more background on this interesting technology!

HTH,
Dave

> On Sep 18, 2022, at 9:00 AM , xtensionlist-request at machomeautomation.com wrote:
> 
> From: Dee Dee Sommers <deesquared at mac.com <mailto:deesquared at mac.com>>
> Subject: Re: OT: whole home wifi mesh recommendations
> Date: September 17, 2022 at 1:33:29 PM PDT
> To: XTension Discussion List <xtensionlist at machomeautomation.com <mailto:xtensionlist at machomeautomation.com>>
> 
> 
> Hi David,
> 
> WOW!!!!! Thank you so very much for this wealth of advice!  
> 
> I don’t think running ethernet is practical in my home but the location of our fixed devices: husband’s Mac Mini he uses in his home office, printer, scanner and my laptop and printer are really the only fixed devices in addition to our Apple TV. I specifically declined providing our Dish with the wifi password. So I will definitely look at the possibility of relocating the cable modem and Airport Extreme to get a stronger wifi signal and reduce the load.
> 
> TP-Link has some interesting units which claim to carry the data signal over power lines — The first unit is connected to the router via ethernet then carries the signal over the powerlines (which is what piqued my interest: powerlines!)  These look like older units: the wifi they carry is 2.4gHz.  But they do claim to be compatible with TP-Link’s OneMesh technology that I am still trying to study. So I’m wondering if I can use some of these units from TP-Link to establish a wifi 6 mesh with a backhaul plus be able to put an ethernet connector where I need via their powerline units.
> https://www.amazon.com/s?k=powerline+network+adapter+with+wifi&rh=p_78%3AB09L85MFNY%2Cssx%3Arelevance&tag=hdtl-wpa7617kit-20 <https://www.amazon.com/s?k=powerline+network+adapter+with+wifi&rh=p_78:B09L85MFNY,ssx:relevance&tag=hdtl-wpa7617kit-20>
> 
> 

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