Powerline Networking 101

[matchenm]

From Newegg customer reviews, performance of even the latest powerline equipment is far inferior to ethernet or even wifi. Plus the units have massive quality control issues. Not interested.

Performance can vary, as there are a lot of mitigating factors. Tom's will soon be posting some unit reviews along with testing methodology used to provide more insight into what units perform best. Stay tuned!

 

[s997863]

"While yes they CAN work across circuit breakers (and thus across different circuits) as long as they are on the same phase, its not guaranteed and usually degrades performance. They are not sold for that purpose."

My router & room are actually on different floors. Since we have 3-phase, 4-wire panels here (110 / 220 VAC for line-neutral / line-line respectively), should I ask an electrician to use a cirtcuit-breaker-finder, to check if the outlet I want ethernet access to can pick up noise sent on the outlet nearest to my router? Would that confirm for sure that they're on the same circuit?

off-topic: are the pages on tomshardware loading & scrolling horribly slowly & stutteringly for anyone else? I'm having no problem with other websites.

 

[matchenm]

@quadrider21

Great artical, I'd like to know a little more about what the security button does.
Do all three of these standards support security measures?

Great question! The only security measures currently implemented are the AES encryption protected by pre-shared key. Using this network membership key, you can restrict which adapters are permitted to talk to others.