For the longest time I would never advocate Poweline Ethernet as a viable solution for getting connectivity into a troublesome area. I felt that the technology was prone to interference and therefore an unreliable solution that could never deliver a consistent connection.

After a few failed attempts to trace Cat5 cable into the garage in my San Francisco apartment in order to connect two pairs to get 100MBPS connectivity between the front and back of the apartment, I decided to try out a Powerline Ethernet solution. I picked up a pair of TP-LINK 200Mbps units and was surprised at the setup procedure. It was fairly easy and I had the units connected in under five minutes.

Of course I wanted to test performance so I started to graph latency to the wireless router on the other side of the apartment.

An iperf test also showed a solid 28.9 Mbits/second transfer rate.

C:\tools>iperf -c 10.10.1.27 -p 200 -t 120
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 10.10.1.27, TCP port 200
TCP window size: 8.00 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[156] local 10.10.1.60 port 58742 connected with 10.10.1.27 port 200
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[156]  0.0-120.0 sec   413 MBytes  28.9 Mbits/sec

C:\tools>

Overall I’ve been impressed by the performance and now have Ethernet extended to the other half of the apartment. Not bad for a $30 connectivity solution.