I live in a pretty typical for London double story house, my study is upstairs with TV etc downstairs. Till now I just use a Wireless N router to get connectivity downstairs but it’s proven to be less than reliable. Additionally my ADSL router was upstairs – but on an extension and not on the main plug, it’s a recipe for disaster.
I’ve considered many options, long cables and all sorts of things like this. Today while wandering through PC shops trying to find a decent USB reader I again noticed the Homeplug devices and thought I’ll give them a try.
I bought 3 units of the Devolo dLAN 200 AVeasy units, they are 200Mbps maximum devices and support all sorts of fancy things like AES Encryption and basically an ACL of sorts to only allow certain devices to talk to each other. You can essentially create a VLAN by giving groups of devices different passwords etc.
At first I was fairly sceptical but figured it’s worth a shot, I am glad to say the devices totally exceeded my wildest expectations.
Installation was a breeze, pop them into the wall, plug in cables and it all just work. Of course it is not secured by default so I went digging through their site, the docs and so forth is pretty crap to say the least but I found software for Linux, Windows and OS X to manage them. Each device has a security id on the back and you just type the keys for all your devices into the app and provide a password. This gets used to secure the network with AES.
I have now moved my router and firewall machine downstairs to the main socket – ADSL is now much stabler – and have moved the Wifi router downstairs too via the Devolo units. Overall the whole setup just works great, even my Xbox is working great again after my old Wireless Bridge died.
I use a 1GB switch on my LAN and get around 0.3ms ping times in general, if I ping a device on the other end of the Devolo units ping times are around 4ms, transfer speeds over the units are around 7MB/sec when using scp, these figures are very respectable and much better than I had hoped for in the past while considering them.
At +- 50 GBP per unit and the sacrifice of a wall socket its a pretty expensive solution (other manufacturers apparently have ones that act as a network and power adapter so you don’t waste a port) but for me this has proven to be an excellent solution and completely sorted out my network reliability issues.
