Experiences with Powerline networks?

[tendonut]

Has anyone given Powerline networks a try yet for streaming?

I went and bought a highly rated Powerline network pair (ZyXEL PLA4215 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006L6X7PM/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1) which was delivered yesterday, the same day I got my beta invite.

My living room has quite a few obstacles between it and my computer room, which is on the second floor, so I opted out of running cat6 myself. The house is a year old, so the electrical wiring should be great.

I'm noticing, using the adapter's monitoring software, that when I have my adapters on different floors (different circuits), I get latency around 1-3ms (reasonable) but get a total bandwidth throughout between 50mbps and 70mbps. When I connect the adapters on the same floor, but different rooms, I get closer to 200mbps. This seems to dramatically affect the framerate while streaming. 15fps while on different circuits, rock solid 30fps when on the same.

I am not entirely sure if I just don't have the greatest powerline adapters, or if this is to be expected.

[Apply]

My powerline setup works okay. I know 720 at 60fps works fine and I've nearly got 1080 at 60 working. The ping time is much higher than my ethernet network though. Depends on your wiring a bit.

[tendonut]

Is everyone who is having good results using both powerline adapters on the same circuit? Like I said, my house is brand new, very clean wiring yet my results have been terrible.

[dovahkiin]

I am using powerline currently because my big screen is in a room that used to be a garage that the last owners converted into a family room. I wish I could harwire everything but it doesn't always work out that way. I am combining WD Powerline and TP-Link powerline adapters.

From my POV I have noticed that it works very well. I sometimes see some pretty bad latency and fps which is to be expected in a beta like this. I am really excited to see how this feature will evolve in the time to come.

[j0rge]

Well that was weird, yesterday it was hit and miss, today it's having no problems streaming Tomb Raider @ 1080x60fps. Latency numbers are similar to gigE; let's hope this lasts.

[Samwise Tarley]

I cannot host anything from my powerline connection @ 75-100mb/s. My computer is very well fast enough it's just that the powerline network gives it a high ping and slow response speeds. I got around 20 ping when streaming to a host over gigabit lan, and when I decided to host via gigabit lan the ping decreased to 2. I'm pretty sure wifi would be better at this point.

[Fetziii]

I have 2 areas wired with Gigabit ethernet. They are connected with these powerline adapters: TP-Link Gigabit TL-PA511 (500MBit). The QoS config is set to "Online Gaming".

Synthetic tests:
100-130 mbit/s net throughput (copying a large benchmark file)
~300 mbit/s gross (as shown in the "TP link powerline utility" tool)
~2ms ping

Streaming tests:
- Overall good performance @ 1080p 60fps
- Some games have a ~1000ms sound delay, but not all (might be a bug specific with these games, e.g. Dirt3)
- Streaming latency is between 5-20ms
- Input latency is very low around 2-5ms
- Monitor latency is quite high ~50-60ms

(side note: host and client mashines are very powerful with Win7 and Win8.1 respectively)

[Marc Repere]

I tried both on powerline and WIFI. I don't have latency spikes i can see on wifi when I use powerline, but it's not very good (still better than wifi) because of the old wires of the house. I have no problem watching 1080p videos on xbmc with powerline.

I experienced slow decode @ 1080p on TV, I think due to the client machine (macbook 2010). It's better with a lower resolution.

[m-p{3}]

Monsieur Patate님이 먼저 게시:

My own experience with power line adapters is that WiFi works better. I use one for my Sling box because it doesn't have WiFi and it works good enough but for gaming the power line adapter caused me some random lag spikes issues that I don't have over WiFi.

I remember having a ping a little higher than what you are describing too (however the ones I had were made by D-Link, not the best stuff available out there...)

I had the opposite experience. The WiFi over my place is congested (yay living around a lot of appartments, and there's a log of interference between all the access points (all channels are overcrowded). I've been able to consistently stream all my stuff over powerline adapter from my PC to PS3.

[Phunky]

I run homeplugs with wifi through my house and it works perfect on my Macbook Air. I get around 40mb download usually through the wifi on my homeplugs so that helps alot as never seen it use more than 35% bandwidth.

So far loving it although only testing for short periods atm

[To0]

I have a pair of Dlinks, i can stream full HD movies no bother and the streaming data suggests I can sustain 30mb/s so it should be fine but the ping is about 16ms to 25ms so I'm going to try wireless to see if that is better.

[Tig Ol' Bitties]

Older Netgear powerline adapter here. Works slightly better than wifi for streaming.

[blaklabz]

All this talk of powerline, has anyone tried using a moca network?

[slouken]

Yes, here are MOCA reports:
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/homestream/discussions/0/630802979505968180/

[borg_7_of_9]

Some Interesting ping results for powerline in here just though I'd share my ping..
From PC to ModemRouter 100Mbit/802.11n - powerline - Switch -

Pinged from my main PC 100Mbit to Modem/Router..

Blueray player via switch 1-5ms average 2ms
SteamOS PC via Powerline - switch 3-12ms average 6
SteamOS PC via Powerline - switch blueray player off 1-4ms average 2ms
SteamOS PC via wireless 150Mbit 2-5ms average 3

That's with the wife on the net via wireless
Not sure what my max transfer speed is but it's up to 100Mbit for the powerline adapter

[mr_trotta]

I was running Powerline adapters as well. Streaming was very slow and wasn't working well. I did an Internet Speed test and found I was at 18ms Ping, 33.41 Download & 18.19 Upload. I then switched to Cat 6 and found I had a 16 ms Ping, 56.82 Download, & 25.18 Upload. Streaming ran much more smoothly. When pressing F6, I initially had two line graphs (red & blue a little distance appart with some spikes of distance between the two. When using Cat 6, there were right on top of one another. No way am I going back to Powerline adapters.