[SOLVED] AV2 powerline adapters, speed question

jhsachs

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Apr 10, 2009
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I've got a situation where connectivity through the powerlines is very poor, and my current (pre-AV2) adapters perform much farther below their nominal speed than is typical. Will it benefit me to get the fastest AV2 adapters I can afford, or will any good AV2 product yield about the same results?
 
Solution
yes, but the caveat with AV2 is that their performance decreases w/ line noise and they don't work well across breakers - so those may be your issue

I've got a situation where connectivity through the powerlines is very poor, and my current (pre-AV2) adapters perform much farther below their nominal speed than is typical. Will it benefit me to get the fastest AV2 adapters I can afford, or will any good AV2 product yield about the same results?
yes, but the caveat with AV2 is that their performance decreases w/ line noise and they don't work well across breakers - so those may be your issue

I've got a situation where connectivity through the powerlines is very poor, and my current (pre-AV2) adapters perform much farther below their nominal speed than is typical. Will it benefit me to get the fastest AV2 adapters I can afford, or will any good AV2 product yield about the same results?
 
Solution
I was in a similar situation and just did a small upgrade from 500av to 600av and the throughput doubled. I haven't gotten any av2 units yet, but I would expect a serious increase in usable bandwidth.

Also, depending on if you have coax cabling available, I would also look into moca as I've been very happy with it as it was just as easy to set up as powerline and much, much faster.
 

jhsachs

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Apr 10, 2009
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yes, but the caveat with AV2 is that their performance decreases w/ line noise and they don't work well across breakers - so those may be your issue

Well, yes, that probably is my issue. I appreciate you taking time to help, but I'm sure whether you mean "Yes, it will help you" or "Yes, it will help, but it won't help you"!

A general, probably unnecessary comment: The two endpoints in question are at opposite ends of a fairly large house, so it's not surprising that bandwidth is low. But I assume that "on different breakers" is not sufficient condition for this problem to occur. Otherwise powerline extenders would be essentially useless. Unless your house was wired before 1960, any two outlets that are on the same breaker are almost certainly close enough that an extender is not needed.
 
Other than some better data encoding in av2 the main difference is they also use the grounding wire to pass signal as well as the 2 wires used to carry power. The grounding wire because of code requirements tends to be spliced together into basically 1 big piece of wire.

Not sure why circuit breakers caused so much trouble for some people. The older av200 units had the most issues.

The problem is not gone and in someways has gotten worse. They have new arc fault breakers required in the newest houses. Only certain brands appear to cause issues so it is even more hit and miss but av2 technology seem to be less affected.