VM - Homeplugs Bottleneck ?

Hi,

I am on a Plusnet 80mb line and am tempted by Virgins Black Friday deals. You can 'Omph' the deals, for example a 200Mb line with a Sim card for £35 and a 350Mb line with sim card for £40. Much faster and for not much more cost.

The problem I suspect is limitation of homeplugs?


The Router is in the downstairs Hallwway, the main PC is in the study upstairs., Connected directly to the router I get c. 74Mbs on speedtest, In the study ( via Netgear PL1000 homeplugs) I get c. 55/60Mbs on the same speedtests.

Now if I go back downstairs, and plug both homeplugs into the same socket dowstairs, and connect a laptop to the homeplugs, I get about 70Mb - on par with the router.

So with no distance between both homeplugs I get similar speeds as if directly connected to the router. But with distance between router and upstairs study I lose about 20Mbs.

Maybe I am thinking about it all wrong - but I am losing about 20%+ or am I hitting a hard limit of the homeplugs ?

I guess what I am trying to say, if I get VM 200 or 350Mbs, will I get higher speeds in the study or have a hit a wall, in my environment I wont get much beyond 60mb ?

I appreciate limitations of homeplugs and environmental factors, but looking at other tests and forum pots, it seems that most with the same homeplugs can squeeze 120Mbs over a reasonable distance.

BTW the wiring is not ancient - house was completely rewired in the last 20 years. I have removed any potential 'noisy' applicances

Homeplugs are distance impacted, so not likely to get above what you see today without buying new much faster plugs and then you might not see much difference.

Difference between you and others is the noise situation on the mains wiring and how friendly the mains wiring is to the home plug signals. Distance between two sockets on two different floors is often a LOT more then the physical distance, as floors are wired back to the mains fuse panel so that you can isolate them individually, rather than straightest routes.

Mesh Wi-Fi units might actually perform better

In my experience homeplugs are impacted more by electrical noise than by distance - I have used them over a distance of 100 metres between my house and outbuildings (going through 2 distribution boards), with them working reliably at their rated speed. But I have also had difficulty with them working reliably in adjacent rooms on the same ring main in an environment with washing machine and dishwasher, and using a (lead-acid) battery charger would kill the connection altogether even if on a different ring-main.

Would doing a network test (iperf) help ? I mean 1 laptop with homeplug downstairs and another with homeplug upstairs ? Send a a file from one to another and see if that exceed current max speed ?


Of course I need to take into account 100 or 1000 lan ports on laptops and cat cable speed. Oh and SSD speeds - alot to consider. If the file transfer speed does go beyond then I know theres some headroom in homeplugs ?

I've just done exactly what you're considering.

It's well worth experimenting with different sockets too. I've found quite variable results even on the same ring - and definitely better results when on the same ring. Oh and make sure you use AV2 devices - I found they are a lot faster. (I believe the PL1000 devices are AV2 devices.)

If your house is anything like mine, outside the kitchen ring, there's a bit of a scattergun approach to which sockets are "electrically" closest to each other.

I've just moved back to Virgin on the Black Friday deals now their upstream speeds are more respectable. I'd moved away (to PlusNet) because of the poor upstream with VM (I'm lucky enough to sync at 80/20 on VDSL) and also because on Powerline stuff I couldn't distribute their faster speeds around the house in any useful way so it wasn't worth paying so much for it. I now have a small backbone of Cat6 laid around the ground floor under carpet edges, with a tiny bit of v. short range Powerline and that works very well.

Not sure I'd bother having VM with only Powerline and WiFi to get it around the house. The VM pings (jitter and actual latency) are much worse than with VDSL. So there is a price to pay for all that bandwidth! I'd go FTTP if it was available.

On testing, I'd suggest you use the Powerline utilities to look at reported connection speeds between Powerline devices which are completely accurate (but not very representative of actual throughput) and that will help you work out which are the best mains sockets/devices to use. Personally I like the TP Link app. It gives a simple Cyan coloured map and works with most devices (Devolo being an exception). I've found that a lot easier than to keep running speed tests.

If you're able to run some cat 6 from your router to underneath your PC room and a short PowerLine link upstairs you might get some lovely speeds at the PC, but testing is all!

As an example, to get a decent connection (using Powerline) into my garage, I have a Cat 6 run to quite a distant part of the house which just happens to be next to the socket from which the garage mains power is spurred. It is a counter-intuitive setup and I only discovered this with a lot of experimentation as the garage power cable is buried and doesn't come into the house where I expected it to! It bumped me from a flaky 16Mbps connection up to a reliable 200Mbps connection though. And then I could finally get decent WiFi coverage from the garage into the garden and proper webcam streaming.

One final thought - If you use a hybrid of Powerline and Cat6, make sure you only connect one Powerline device to the the Ethernet cabling that goes back to the router. Otherwise you risk creating loop - and that's bad!

Edited by albany11 (Tue 26-Nov-19 15:37:30)

Thanks. I have tried the TP Link app, it reports that the downstairs homeplug 'transmits' at 250Mbs to the upstairs one. Not sure what this equates to in terms of throughput, but it seems 60mbs is the fatest speedtest I can get.


I will try other sockets around the house. I think I will probably end up at the conclusion that homeplugs just dont cut it. If I want faster, I need to lay down Cat cabling - Which is is shame. Destined to be stuck with a 80mb line forever ! (could be worse..)

250Mbs sounds pretty respectable, but I do remember that these figures are very "ambitious" relative to throughput.. What do you get in receive direction?

My garage connection is presently reporting 240 outbound and 60 inbound which is pretty typical. In the summer I got around 50Mbps max WiFi download from the garage on 5Ghz, but that might be limited by my WiFi AP.- I can't remember how good it is. So a 60 limit from a 250Mbps powerline report sounds plausible.

I found a small bump up in speed from AV2000 devices over AV1000, but it even varied by brand (and reliability certainly did) so I doubt you'd gain much from that.

I found the pain of running some Cat cabling has been worth it - sorry! If you have good eyes, it's pretty easy to crimp your own plugs, and the cable runs quite easily just inside the gripper rod at the edge of carpeted rooms. I only had two runs (from router in centre of house to front and back respectively) and it's been a game-changer. I then recently added one more to sort out the garage connection and ran that outside with some external ethernet cable. I finally don't get the cries of "Dad, the WiFi's not working....".

Just to incentivise you, my new VM connection is quite often giving Ookla reports of 380Mbps and 40Mbps and all for £6/month (plus £35 connection) more than my Plusnet VDSL which typically gave me low 70s and 19 ....!
Not sure if the link will come through https://www.speedtest.net/result/8798549860.png

Edited by albany11 (Tue 26-Nov-19 17:07:29)

You should try WiFi from the Hub 3 as well and check it�s range.

Homeplugs work but crossing floors in the UK is always slower than same floor. Also the speed numbers are not comparable with Ethernet. Check the reported PHY and halve it as a rough estimate. Getting 80Mbps through homeplug AV2 is very respectable.

At 350Mbps your connection will max out most 802.11ac / WiFi 5 devices, if you can get range. My ASUS RT-88U is a 4 stream WiFi router but all my clients are 2 stream and the theoretical maximum is 350! My VM 200 connection works well.

You may need to look at WiFi 6 (formerly 802.11ax) router and client (eg laptop) to get the throughput.

Thanks for advice.

On wifi AC, I get full 74mbs on a speedtest only when within 10 feet of the router. Once I move up to the upstairs study it tops out at about 55-60mbs - which funnily enough is the max of my homeplugs.

Sticking with 80mbs, when for a few pounds more I can get 350Mbs is so wrong! I'll be moving in the next year or so, I might just stick with Plusnet.

BTW, For retentions, do VM generally significantly increase the subscriptions ? It would make me feel better, if I knew I could only really stick with the speed for a year anyway !

I have just had a thought - Would VM go all the way around the side and back of the house (semi detached) and install the point in the upper back study ?

Have you considered the Gigagate?

If you shop around you can find it for under £100.