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In my experience this works worse in newer houses with modern (more complex, less transparent) electrical systems, and at best you get sub-WiFi speeds.

You have little to lose by trying, but there’s no guarantee it will work at all, even less work well.



I have a very old house and it works well for me.

I think you do best to have just two stations in a powerline network situation because the contention and overhead of contention control is much less. (Compare that to gigabit ethernet which is full duplex and switched so there is little or no contention)

You can connect a "distant" powerline NIC to an ethernet switch and plug multiple devices into that if they are close together, that works better than plugging in multiple powerline NICs.

Unfortunately new houses have circuit breakers that detect broadband noise caused by arcing. These are good for catching fires early, but will blow if you use powerline NICs.


I have an older house that has been expanded several times, with some rather amateurish wiring. One outlet works, the one next to it doesn't. Slow speed, interruptions that require resets...

Google wifi pucks work much better, in spite of the cinder block walls.


Seconded - if you're going to try Powerline networking, buy your equipment from a retailer with a generous returns policy.


Like PaulHoule, I have an old house, but with a new electrical system. It was proudly rewired by yours truly, with GFIs and AFCIs all over -- and an added subpanel.

Anyways, I use a set of powerline adapters with a second wifi router at the other end because the walls in my house are very thick (the studs are covered in shiplap on both sides). The throughput is fast enough to stream video on the other end, but I haven't put it to any measured test.

In the summer, I often take the whole setup to one of the outdoor plugins, so that we have solid wifi on the deck. So it can work quite well. Whether it will in any given circumstance is uncertain I suppose.


The theoretical throughput is lower, but I found the real-world performance for network filesystem access specifically was wildly superior. Never determined exactly why- latency? dropped packets? but 10-20mbps powerline links mopped the floor with 200mbps wifi links, even with only a two foot airgap.

(These weren't label-advertised speeds, these were the negotiated links)


It has improved a lot in the last few years, in case your experience was from a few years ago.




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