Residential Networking over Telephone

https://computer.rip/2025-02-02-residential-networking-over-telephone.html

by zdw • 1 year ago

111 48 1 year ago

It's tangential to the topic (though mentioned in the article towards the end) so I'll be lazy and ask the crowd here: What's the current state of the art in powerline networking?

I have an application to network a couple of outbuildings. I don't have tremendous bandwidth needs (1Gbps would be glorious, 100Mbps would be fine). I would prefer wired connections for reliability and privacy. I would prefer not to trench and run fiber. The outbuildings already have electrical service from a central panel. Powerline networking might be a good fit.

There's a lot of consumer stuff out there. I'd like something a little more geared toward an industrial, commercial, or service provider use. (Analogously, think of the difference between using a dumb Netgear switch versus a managed name-brand managed switch.)

Edit: I appreciate the feedback I'm hearing here. This is exactly the kind of stuff I wanted to hear. Sorry to hijack HN for my personal needs like this!

kennethrc• 1 year ago

FWIW, 5 years ago a Gigabit PA pair could only get ~200Mbit/sec between two rooms in the same house, and even that was finicky.

Maybe the tech has improved since then, but I suspect not.

tkuraku• 1 year ago

I know you wanted wired, but a point to point wireless link might be a good fit. https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/ubb

EvanAnderson3• 1 year ago

Ubiquiti stockholder. I want everybody to buy some. >smile<

I have a variety of Ubiquiti point-to-point setups out in the field-- AirFiber down to Nanostations. It's good gear, for sure.

For this particular application I'm concerned about being in an RF-hostile environment and unreliability, as compared to wired.

rob742• 1 year ago

I tried powerline networking for a while, but got so frustrated with the hardware (it disconnected randomly after a few days or weeks and failed to reconnect automatically - all the while hogging the WiFi although it didn't have an Internet connection via powerline, so all connected devices were offline) that I eventually gave up and now just use a WiFi repeater. Of course, that might also depend on the manufacturer? I would say the best alternative is to try it and just send the hardware back if it doesn't work (reliably)?

brk2• 1 year ago

"State of the art" and "powerline networking" have never really gone together well.

The most common approach to your situation is point to point wireless. This can be off the shelf stuff from Ubiquiti/D-Link/Whatever, to more specialized products from Aruba, Cambium, etc. Ranges of 1Km and Speeds of 1Gbps are not out of the question at all. You do need line of sight though.

Wireless (or fiber) to link buildings is also a good approach as it eliminates electrical conductivity paths across networks for lightning strikes and power surges.

maples37• 1 year ago

Since fiber is non-conductive, I've heard that it's code-compliant to run optical fiber in the same conduit as your power lines. (Normally, high-voltage and low-voltage conductors are required to be in separate conduits even if going to the same place.)

Of course, this requires that you ran your electrical in conduit instead of direct-bury, so this might or might not work for you.

Kye• 1 year ago

Linus Tech Tips did a video on getting internet between their main building and a new one this way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9P_R-ApD-g

486sx333• 1 year ago

Point to point line of sight has come a very long way. I successfully setup a connection about 2 miles across a small body of water and it worked very well. For shorter distances the equipment costs are quite reasonable

baby_souffle• 1 year ago

It does get better with each generation.

Biggest factor is noise (thunk inductive loads like motors) on the circuits. Place your termination adapter as close to the main panel as you can and ideally on the same circuit or at least the same phase. Gfci and similar will nuke a good deal of signal.

It was a pain, but I made a matrix of every outlet and had a simple iperf server running on a raspberry pi on a lipo battery bank. I went around with a laptop and a usb eth adapter and did basic tests to get an idea of limits.

MisterTea2• 1 year ago

I have no experience with power line networking but I would start there and experiment.

If that doesn't work I would try two things: If the electrical cable is in a conduit or duct of some sort you could try to run a 600V rated Cat 6 cable (to comply with electrical codes) or fiber right alongside the feeders. That will not be easy as you likely have to pull the feeders, pair the network cable and then pull it back. And that is if the conduit hasn't collapsed or intruded by roots/water/dirt/etc. Second is an aerial line ran through trees or poles.

A third option is something most would avoid but just run a thin length of black poly tube with a fiber inside along the ground. Years ago a friend powered his shed at his parents countryside house by running a length of romex in a black sprinkler tube along the ground hugging the treeline of his property. Not exactly to code and illegal for power but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do and he never had a problem.

Industrial stuff isn't far from consumer gear. Most of it uses the same components but in a rugged DIN rail or panel mount housing. Even industrial stuff is embracing wireless.

And for fiber look up BiDi - bidirectional - SFP's that use a single fiber that is easier to route. They sell rugged outdoor simplex fibers for this kind of stuff.

ikiris2• 1 year ago

Never run copper Ethernet between buildings. If you’re going to run something run fiber.

harrall• 1 year ago

Really depends on your wiring and what’s on the circuit.

Using powerline as a single point-to-point in 2018 worked flawlessly for me with 0 drop outs, 0 latency problems, and 0 throughput problems for 4+ years and then my lines changed and it became useless.

If it works well, it can be a good way to put off the work required to hardwire.

ssl-3• 1 year ago

I've used powerline gear twice, both for similar applications.

In the first instance, someone wanted wifi in their detached garage at the back of the lot. A couple of randomly-selected powerline adapters and an access point later, and that rig worked reliably for them for over a decade.

In the second instance, someone else wanted wifi in their detached garage at the back of the lot. A couple of randomly-selected powerline adapters and an access point later, and I couldn't make it work at all.

The main difference between these two was that one had power fed from the house's main breaker panel, and the other had power fed directly from the same transformer that the house was using but it had its own service entrance (and meter).

This anecdotally suggests it can work, and that security is inherently enhanced by not allowing the neighbors to poke at it at all (if I can't use it because there's a transformer on the loop, then the layperson next door can't use it either).

However: At my own place with my own detached garage at the back of the lot, I just use some fairly minimum-effort wifi. I've got a Mikrotik access point in a central spot in the house, and another one in the garage that acts as both a wifi client and a wifi access point (and an ethernet bridge).

Works fine. Speeds are in the >100 megabit range in both directions, which is a whole fuckton of bandwidth for anything I intend to do out there.

If the garage were far-enough away, I'd enhance this by mounting the requisite mikrotik hardware on the outside walls instead of the inside walls. If the garage were way, way out there, then I'd use different mikrotiks with directional antennas to backhaul, and additional radios indoors for wifi coverage.

If I had more than one outbuilding, then I might use a one-to-many topology with an omni at the house and directional antennas on the outbuildings.

(I made an extra SSID that was just for the garage to keep the dumb devices out there from wandering onto the house's access point for whatever dumb reason they elect to do that, but meh: They'd still do dumb shit like that even if I were to string fiber.)

univerio• 1 year ago

If you have coax, I've found MoCA to be more reliable than powerline.

ikiris2• 1 year ago

TLDR: don’t

More words: no really don’t. Either do wireless or bury some fiber depending on needs.

gertrunde• 1 year ago

I replaced my home plug av2 adapter with g.hn ones a year or two ago, and it has been much better.

Lower latency, more stable, and higher bandwidth. (The av2 ones would just drop out for 90-ish seconds a few times a month, which was quite annoying).

It's interesting the article talks about home plug av2 and g.hn coexisting, when my experience has been that g.hn powerline is much better, and it feels like g.hn is generally perceived as a successor to av2 in the UK.

Edit: also, I'm in agreement with other folk in that point-to-point wireless is the solution I most often see used in that case, or sometimes fibre.

Edit2: and it's also probably the cheapest one to test. If it's not good enough, then you know you're looking at wireless or fibre.

jcrawfordor2• 1 year ago

The current state of HomePlug is weird, the organization behind it dissolved in 2016 and basically dumped the spec on the table (they made it public domain). Since it's closely related to IEEE 1901 it doesn't seem likely that HomePlug will ever "go away," but it's also not going to get better. So I think it's definitely fair to say that G.hn is the replacement, in that it's more actively developed, but HomePlug devices remain plentiful on the market. IME HomePlug devices are more commonly sold in the US than G.hn powerline devices, but I get the impression that things are different in Europe.

johnklos• 1 year ago

It's perfect for things that just need a modest amount of bandwidth, like a TV. Most streams are a few tens of megabits, and that's about all you can reasonably expect from powerline networking.

When you try to use as much bandwidth as you can, they fail in sometimes spectacular ways. I have some old Radio Shack 10 Mbps ones that have brought a high end Juniper to its knees when the Radio Shack box's "collision" LED was fully lit. Newer devices do better, but it's best to just use powerline networking for things that need steady, continuous traffic.

jcrawfordor2• 1 year ago

the typical "industrial" version of powerline is IEEE 1901, which for example is used by some electrical utilities for SCADA and by some smart meters. The difference can be somewhat academic as many modern powerline protocols are members of the same "family," and IEEE 1901 has two different PHYs that are basically adoptions of HomePlug and HD-PLC (another powerline protocol that I didn't mention because it never really went anywhere with consumers). Some HomePlug devices are certified as interoperable with the HomePlug-derived flavor of IEEE 1901, so sometimes they're literally the same thing.

IEEE 1901 is only specified for 500Mbps though. The more industrial use-cases are rarely high-bandwidth and that market is often pretty satisfied with even Kbps performance, they're just sending Modbus and that sort of thing. IEEE 1901 equipment is also going to be quite a bit more expensive to obtain since the market is small and mostly works on large contracts.

I agree with others that point-to-point wireless is probably your best bet. It can be similarly priced to HomePlug AV2 transceivers and, sort of ironically, will probably turn out to be more reliable. HomePlug tends to have trouble when there are neutral bonds because that adds "side legs" to the bus that harbor reflections. That's why people tell you that, as a rule of thumb, your transceivers need to be on the same circuit for good performance. It's a particularly bad with an outbuilding scenario because you've probably got two panels with two neutral buses, adding two different sets of reflections. Hard for the modulation scheme to contend with. I've personally run HomePlug AV1 from a house to a pump shed with a subpanel and got ~15Mbps performance with near-total dropout when the pump was running. ymmv depending on the wiring.

You might also consider direct-burial Ethernet, which is not very expensive. However, you'll get into some complexities with bonding and lightning protection and you might need to study the code book a bit. Some people will insist that one must never connect separate buildings with metallic communications conductors, but I would remind them that until about the 1980s that was the only way to do it, and techniques and equipment to do it safely have been developed. You just have to, you know, learn and use them.

xattt• 1 year ago

I set up family with powerline adaptors about 6-7 years ago. They worked great for their application. The only side effect was the range on the garage door opener remote dropped significantly.

graymatters• 1 year ago

55-60Mbps is a reasonable expectation. Don’t get fooled by exuberant speeds advertised by the powerline equipment manufacturers. Lag can jump by ~25msec

jjav• 1 year ago

I would prefer wired connections for reliability and privacy.

Regarding privacy, I've always wondered about this regarding ethernet over power lines. Surely the signal must leak to some extent to nearby houses on the same grid?

tguvot• 1 year ago

you need to add adapter to power line network through pairing process. there is some kind of key exchange/encryption.

GJim• 1 year ago

I would prefer wired connections for reliability and privacy.

* You will not get reliability. Ethernet over power lines are notorious for developing problems related to power line load, topography and switching.

* You will not get privacy. The ethernet signal does not magically stop at "your" power network, but commonly escapes and can be picked up at other houses down the street from you.

Seriously, forget it. There is a reason Wi-Fi is more popular.

rob742• 1 year ago

If you look at how incredibly thin standard telephone wires are, it seems incredible that with the right technology you can transmit up to 100 Mbit/s over a pair of them...

epcoa• 1 year ago

In addition to conductor thickness not being a sole direct factor in bandwidth (the interconnects carrying 32 Gb/s PCI-e or Thunderbolt are much thinner), standard telephone wire is the same or greater than Cat 5e.

Most telephone interconnects will be at least 24 AWG, some short run cables may be 26 AWG (same as Cat 5). Really old interconnects will often be 22 and even as high as 18. And the thing is, these are usually worse from a high frequency transmission line standpoint as they weren’t designed for anything above 4khz voice.

Poor noise rejection, cross talk, poor loss characteristics, and inconsistent termination are the more challenging issues in pressing high speed out of the phone network.

giantrobot• 1 year ago

I first used PhoneNet in a small school computer lab. For the time it was awesome. A bunch of Macs could pretty easily share files and print to the shared printers.

A point to remember is the machines weren't sharing terabytes, gigabytes, or even necessarily megabytes of files. Text or Word docs, spreadsheets, and occasionally networked games were a majority of the traffic. Rarely was the speed ever an issue. You just had to learn some behaviors like don't open and edit a file directly from a network share and everything would slow down when sending a job to the printer.

An aspect I thought was cool was it worked with cheap adapters on all the Macs in the lab from the old Performas to the latest PowerMacs. Ethernet cards were still fairly expensive as was cabling. A cheap RJ-11 extension cord from RadioShack could add a new drop to the PhoneNet network.

Once Ethernet got cheap it was far and away superior to LocalTalk/PhoneNet networking. There was no going back once you tried Ethernet but for a time LocalTalk was an amazing Mac feature.

autoexec• 1 year ago

It's a shame that a lot of telecoms have either ripped out a bunch of the copper wire they had installed themselves or have just not replaced stolen copper after they successfully lobbied the FTC to let them abandon the lines. It'd have been a great way for communities or small groups to set up their own tiny networks.

icedchai• 1 year ago

At DSL or T1 speeds? You're better off with wireless. We'll also ignore the problem of all copper going back to the central office.

axiolite• 1 year ago

That copper requires upkeep, which is expensive. The maximum speeds are terrible by modern standards. Using the existing right-of-way (established for the copper lines) to install new fiber that will replace the copper, is the right move.

api2• 1 year ago

Speeds aren’t great. Directional WiFi antennas and a local mesh are a much better option for communities. There’s also a slower 900mhz WiFi standard out there that can cover a lot of area and may still be faster than crappy abandoned copper in questionable shape.

castratikron• 1 year ago

EV charging also uses HomePlug. When Ethernet needed to be added to an existing signal line on the EV connector, HomePlug was chosen as the way to do it. Every EV consequentially will need a HomePlug modem to communicate to a charger, so, the world will have HomePlug around for quite some time.

gwbas1c• 1 year ago

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J1772, HomePlug is used in Europe. The article is otherwise rather ambiguous about how it's used in common chargers.

At least for the typical level 2 charger, the signaling is an analog square wave.

devanl• 1 year ago

The typical level 2 charger doesn't have to use HomePlug, but most recent EVs will have a HomePlug modem in order to speak ISO15118 to negotiate the voltage during DC fast charging through the CCS1/2 connector.

The pilot pin that carries the square wave used for J1772 is common to both AC and DC charging, so it's possible for a level 2 charger to incorporate a modem and communicate with the EV.

In many situations it would be an unnecessary expense, but it may become more common even in level 2 chargers in the future since ISO15118 can be used to authenticate the car to the charger for plug-n-charge charging without needing a card or app to authorize the charge.

api2• 1 year ago

I still use HomePlug to connect some cameras and TVs in my house. It works, though real world performance tends to be far lower than advertised.

You only get close to advertised performance if all plugs are more or less on the same circuit branch and the distance isn’t too large.

Residential Networking over Telephone

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