Netgear Powerline 500 speed, secured vs unsecured

[tac_shift]

Hey guys,

In a recent attempt to get the best possible internet speeds out in my garage where my gaming/HD streaming PC is located (after my landlord had me take down the cat6 I'd strung up from my apartment) I decided to try out powerline: Netgear Powerline 500 XAVB5201 v2.

It was very straight forward to get it connected, albeit in an unsecured condition (securing is a built in option of this model), which resulted in a red LED (meaning I had under 50 mbps) on both adapters. Speedtest.net gave me 1.5mbps down and .7mbps up.

Obviously, that's a no-go for gaming/HD streaming, and I'm not surprised considering the relatively long run (150 feet as the crow flies from router to PC) but more importantly the fact that it's not on the same circuit and the wiring in the house is very old (house built in 1875).

However, I encountered problems getting the LAN connection to verify once I hit the "secure connection" buttons on each of the powerline adapters. I've spent a few hours trying to get that going, I'm not sure what the issue is but I'm inclined to scrap the whole deal based on the unsecured speeds I have and move on to another alternative: powerful wifi NIC(to go with my Netgear R7000 router, or digging up some grass, laying pvc and running the goddam ethernet, and maybe piss off my landlord).

My question is this: is there any way that the connection speed could be a whole lot faster in secured mode vs unsecured?

My intuition tells me no. Just looking to confirm.
Ethernet speeds: 65mbps down, 29mbps up
Windows 7 professional

Many thanks in advance.

 

[joanlee199063]

Hi,

1.The secure connection button. It`s better to set them in the same place under the same circuit first to make sure it is successfully set.

2. Different secure mode could be set to see if the speed is better. Generally, different secure algorithm has effect on wireless speed. Try and check.

Hope it may help.

 

[bill001g]

WiFi likely will work worse. 150ft indoors is a lot especially if there are a lot of walls and floors. If you are lucky and there is coax in the house you might get MoCA to work. You could also try the newer form of powerline and see if you get anymore speed. The netgear pl1200 is rated fairly well...but it is $80 and may not really work better, you never really know since it is the house wires.

If your only concern is the security i would not worry a lot about it. It is not like wireless security where someone can use the connection from the road if you leave it unsecured. Unless you landlord has a NAS or something you are accessing all your traffic is going to the internet. Encrypting it between the router and your PC does not protect it past the router and it is more at risk in the internet not encrypted that between your pc and the router. So as long as you are using encryption on your pc (ie https) for important things it likely doesn't make a lot of difference if the powerline is encrypted or not.

 

[tac_shift]

Just to clarify, I'm not worried about security. Has anyone noticed improved speed when operating secured vs unsecured?

 

[bill001g]

When you have really bad signal it runs better unsecured. Some errors are more easily tolerated in data. When it is encrypted generally 1 bit of data corrupted and it can't be unencrypted.
In most situations it makes very little difference the overhead to encrypt the data is very small compared to the speed of cpu chips in the powerline units. I suppose if you really got some device that could pass 1g of traffic you might exceed the cpu capacity.

 

[tac_shift]

Thanks bill, I'll be returning the powerline adapters today. WiFi may actually be my best bet. Since my garage is detached, I only have one exterior wall and the sheet metal of my garage to go through. This is why running cable isn't going to happen, landlord doesn't want it across the lawn or suspended in the air.

Since I have a Netgear AC1900 router, I figure a compatible AC 1900 NIC with external antennae such as the Asus PCE-AC68 will get me the best possible connection. I may even try mounting it on top/outside of the garage (as long as rain won't ruin the antennae).

That NIC is $95. Pretty high for a wireless card. Any thoughts on my setup, think that NIC is worth it?

 

[bill001g]

Outdoor bridge link engenious enh202 or ubiquiti nanostation will solve the outdoor antenna issue.

These are 802.11n on either 2.4g or 5g. They will not be as fast as 802.11ac but tend to be better than any indoor nic with antenna cable. The cable loses a huge amount of signal unless you buy really expensive stuff.

They may make 802.11ac bridge devices also but I have never used them.