This is where monitoring the active SNR margin comes into play...

Some software bugs may cause a router scram and reboot

So test the hypothesis for just a night and see if turning off the HomePlugs makes a difference?

Thinking they won't and knowing they are not affecting you are two different things.

If gaming is hyper critical while HomePlugs are great their tendency to have more jitter than an Ethernet cable would mean you should be replacing them with a cable where at all possible.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

So test the hypothesis for just a night and see if turning off the HomePlugs makes a difference?

Thinking they won't and knowing they are not affecting you are two different things.

If gaming is hyper critical while HomePlugs are great their tendency to have more jitter than an Ethernet cable would mean you should be replacing them with a cable where at all possible.

Thing is, I don't get drops every night. Sometimes for an entire week it'll be fine. Then for a 12-48 hour period I'll get a load of drops then it'll be fine again. Surely if the HomePlugs were causing issues it'd be more often? Especially since one of the gaming PCs plugged in via HomePlugs is no nearly 24/7.

Sadly running cable isn't feasible in this case, I wish I were.

Edited by deleted (Thu 09-Nov-17 13:38:14)

I know for a fact that Home plugs can cause drop outs, I�ve abandoned mine as they were causing my line to drop randomly. I highly recommend trying them off for a week to see if you experience any drop outs, if you do, try moving the Home plugs to a different mains socket and see if that improves things.

The Vodafone modem/router is absolutely useless.
If you have access to a different modem then I recommend trying that for a bit. It's likely your problems will stop.

If any of your sockets/mains wiring is adjacent to the BT line then the use of Homeplugs can cause havoc with FTTC. When I enable my Homeplugs my Retx counters increase from 0-100 per min to 10,000+ per min. That's with the BT Homeplugs that tend to place nice, other models can be MUCH worse.

In reply to a post by gigaplant:

I know for a fact that Home plugs can cause drop outs, I�ve abandoned mine as they were causing my line to drop randomly. I highly recommend trying them off for a week to see if you experience any drop outs, if you do, try moving the Home plugs to a different mains socket and see if that improves things.

Going to try this tomorrow, I've ordered a long ethernet cable I hope to hide to run across the otherside of the room, then run the Homeplugs over the other end of the room.

Thanks for the suggestions guys.

In reply to a post by ollie87:

Going to try this tomorrow, I've ordered a long ethernet cable I hope to hide to run across the otherside of the room, then run the Homeplugs over the other end of the room.

that may work, and is worth trying. however, it may also still fail, since the homeplugs put noise into all of the house wiring, as well as any locally radiated noise.

Just to add to this, with Sky TV, you get a Sky TV box, and a Sky router. You then have a bunch of secondary TV boxes around the house for multiroom.

The Sky system supports linking every TV box over both WiFi and PowerLine, Sky have actually entirely disabled the powerline system and on new routers they don't even support it, as it was found to cause VDSL drop-outs. Now everything on Sky Q, all the TV boxes, main router and WiFi boosters have to link over WiFi.

When you mention WiFi causes higher latency, it certainly should not if using 5Ghz with a decent reception.

Without question powerline / homeplugs = VDSL drop outs in plenty of homes, mine included.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Thu 09-Nov-17 22:14:22)

My Sky Q multiroom system is ethernet connected. No wifi or powerline at all.

Mine is wireless, by default if you get an engineer out they make it all wireless.
A key selling point is the fact you can do multiroom without wires.

I have a whole bunch of Sky Q WiFI boosters all over my home to ensure the signals strong enough everywhere to pull 4K video over WiFi.

I asked an engineer to run ethernet, as getting to the back of the house we have 3 boosters (as he wanted an RSSI of less than -60dbm at each booster), he just refused. To date it has worked quite nicely.

I could run ethernet, true, but that would be by myself.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Thu 09-Nov-17 22:42:40)