Discussion Powerline adapters acting up.

[usualvariety]

Hello, everyone!

Good morning, good day and good evening!

I am having a bit of a situation at hand here.

I have my router on the other side of the room and my laptop, suited with a 1GBPS Lan Card, on the other side of the room.

I have had a Powerline adapter TP-Link AV600, promptly rated at 600 MBPs through powerline.

My internet is 300 MBPs and works perfectly if I take the laptop and connect it directly to the router (at least based on the Speed test.

So, the AV600 is being detected as 100 MBPs and the Speed test results confirm that - (~90/90+-)

I also have a pair of Cat6 cables, so that's ruled out.

Today I bought D-Link AV2 1000, rated at ... 1200 MBPs, I believe? It's either 1GBPS or a bit over.

It does detect it, speeds are doubled (~190/180+-).

However, whenever I play an online game, in this case, League of Legends, my ping constantly spikes around 48-200. In CS:GO, however, it's 30-32.

With the AV600, my ping in LoL is around 42-48, although I get a random disconnect every once in a while. But with the AV600, my ping in CS:GO is never below 70.

I was only using CS:GO as a testing ground to see if this is across the board.

The main things I need consistent connection right now would be League and Streaming.

Tomorrow I will be testing with a different power outlet and will do an actual in-game test while connected to the router, just to see if my ISP is just crapping the pants.

Anyone have any ideas of what I could be doing wrong or would it just be a faulty Powerline adapter? Any settings I might need to switch up?

I did a CMD ping 1.1.1.1 -t, not much of a difference between both connections in the overall in the overall MS there.

Thank you in advance!

 

[kanewolf]

Hello, everyone!

Good morning, good day and good evening!

I am having a bit of a situation at hand here.

I have my router on the other side of the room and my laptop, suited with a 1GBPS Lan Card, on the other side of the room.

I have had a Powerline adapter TP-Link AV600, promptly rated at 600 MBPs through powerline.

My internet is 300 MBPs and works perfectly if I take the laptop and connect it directly to the router (at least based on the Speed test.

So, the AV600 is being detected as 100 MBPs and the Speed test results confirm that - (~90/90+-)

I also have a pair of Cat6 cables, so that's ruled out.

Today I bought D-Link AV2 1000, rated at ... 1200 MBPs, I believe? It's either 1GBPS or a bit over.

It does detect it, speeds are doubled (~190/180+-).

However, whenever I play an online game, in this case, League of Legends, my ping constantly spikes around 48-200. In CS:GO, however, it's 30-32.

With the AV600, my ping in LoL is around 42-48, although I get a random disconnect every once in a while. But with the AV600, my ping in CS:GO is never below 70.

I was only using CS:GO as a testing ground to see if this is across the board.

The main things I need consistent connection right now would be League and Streaming.

Tomorrow I will be testing with a different power outlet and will do an actual in-game test while connected to the router, just to see if my ISP is just crapping the pants.

Anyone have any ideas of what I could be doing wrong or would it just be a faulty Powerline adapter? Any settings I might need to switch up?

I did a CMD ping 1.1.1.1 -t, not much of a difference between both connections in the overall in the overall MS there.

Thank you in advance!

IF this is the kit -- https://www.tp-link.com/us/service-provider/powerline-adapter/tl-pa4010-kit/#specifications Then it has only 100Mbit wired ports. That is not unexpected. The "AV600" is a made up performance number. Nothing but marketing. Your 90Mbit performance is the max for that hardware.
In the same room, WIFI will probably be faster.

 

[bill001g]

In general powerline should not have really increase your latency. There is some overhead but it should be some fairly small fixed amount. You might get packet loss on powerline it should not cause random delays. Pretty much wifi is the only technology that tries to do data retransmission due to errors. Other technologies if they can't correct the errors with the extra bits that are in the encoding they just drop the packet. Now someone posted that g.hn can do retranmission but I am unsure if that is implemented in the powerline units. The adapter you have are av2 and those do not do retransmission from what I know. On wifi retranmitting data takes time so you get random delay spikes.


I would take a cable and string it across the room to test. It would be more likely it is some kind of internet issue causing the delays than the powerline networks.

Games should be about the same on ether type of powerline. Games need almost no bandwidth and having faster does not make it work better because the game only is using about 1mbps.

If there are problems with the powerline units a ping to the router IP should show packet loss.

 

[usualvariety]

IF this is the kit -- https://www.tp-link.com/us/service-provider/powerline-adapter/tl-pa4010-kit/#specifications Then it has only 100Mbit wired ports. That is not unexpected. The "AV600" is a made up performance number. Nothing but marketing. Your 90Mbit performance is the max for that hardware.
In the same room, WIFI will probably be faster.

That is, indeed, the one, however, all over the box it is saying 600 MBPs, guess it's some marketing bull that they pulled combining some stats and, boom, 600.

 

[bill001g]

If you dig around you can still find web pages that show that exact part number called av500. There was a new standard at the time called av2-600. So tplink just changed the name of those units from av500 to av600 trying to get people who don't notice the missing "2". It is still based on the homeplug av500 standard.

What is somewhat surprising, well not to marketing guys, is the device only has a 100mbps port on it. This means they knew the technology would never even come close to 100mbps so they did not put gigabit ethernet ports on it.

The powerline guys are in some ways worse than the the wifi. The home plug standards called av2-600 and av2-1200 are now commonly called av2-1000 and av2-2000. They are not actually any different and get nowhere near even the lower number. What happened is a newer standard based on G.HN came out and they called
their stuff 1000 and 2000 and the vendors using the homeplug standard did not want to be left out I guess. It is hard to say if G.hn is really faster or not. Most real world test show very little difference. The place the G.hn really is impressive is on coax MoCA units. Those unit have a network speed of 2.5g and can actually get 1gbit

 

[usualvariety]

In general powerline should not have really increase your latency. There is some overhead but it should be some fairly small fixed amount. You might get packet loss on powerline it should not cause random delays. Pretty much wifi is the only technology that tries to do data retransmission due to errors. Other technologies if they can't correct the errors with the extra bits that are in the encoding they just drop the packet. Now someone posted that g.hn can do retranmission but I am unsure if that is implemented in the powerline units. The adapter you have are av2 and those do not do retransmission from what I know. On wifi retranmitting data takes time so you get random delay spikes.


I would take a cable and string it across the room to test. It would be more likely it is some kind of internet issue causing the delays than the powerline networks.

Games should be about the same on ether type of powerline. Games need almost no bandwidth and having faster does not make it work better because the game only is using about 1mbps.

If there are problems with the powerline units a ping to the router IP should show packet loss.

Thank you so much for the detailed response!

Would you please elaborate on what GHN stands for (apologies, if it's a stupid question).

It's weird that I don't have the same spike while connected to the weaker AV600, which, as someone mentioned above - actually only supports up to 100 MBPs, so it's doing it's job fairly well. It's just dumb that they are marketing it as 600 MBPs.

I did do a quick test, this time pinging the exact IP, not 1.1.1.1 (I don't know if that would matter or not). Since I CBA to upload them in imgur or somewhere, I will just share the end results here:

Wired - Packets sent /received - 19 , 0 lost
Minimum ms of 0 and maximum of 3

WiFi - Sent/received - 17, no lost
Minimum ms of 1 and a maximum of 10

Over the PA - Sent/received - 20, no lost
Minimum of 2 and a maximum of 146.

I used to have a cable running across the room, but it's not very convenient and I cannot really stretch it over the angles as of yet.

Thank you once again!

 

[bill001g]

Well the way you run cables if the wife will allow it is to tape it to the ceiling

Years ago when I used to get paid to work in networking I used to study details of things like G.HN to get certifications. Now days I only know very basic stuff. You can find huge wiki pages on g.hn if you really want to know.

Pretty much it is a data encoding method that is actually very similar to wifi in some ways. They both are based on QAM data encoding and both now use Mimo to increase the total throughput.

G,HN though is a very complex standard because it can run on many things even old style copper phone lines. What you find now is coax device running g.hn. Some of these are called moca even though moca is a different technology. Then again the latest version of moca is very similar to g.hn in the say the data encoding is done.
Again I have been lazy, I no longer spend hours trying to decode what a 1 page technical document really means. When I was worried about getting a pay check things were different.