Home Networking Alternatives That Suck

Two of the more popular in-home networking approaches are Wi-Fi and home powerline (HomePlug, a system that run IP packets directly over the electrical wiring that connect your power sockets).

Some of the newer powerline systems tout a 200Mbps top-line performance.  But you don't get anywhere near that. We tested this stuff (fairly and objectively, we swear) and here's what we found (we'll publish full results on our site as soon as we have the time):

• Performance degradation with increasing load:  Each additional load will change the impedance profile of the power line.
• Location dependent performance:  Performance deteriorates when the signal crosses circuits, breaker boxes, and surge protectors.
• Interference from household equipment:  Anything with a duty cycle (eg. a dimmer or microwave oven) will interfere with powerline networking.
• Interference from neighbors: In multiple-dwelling-units, interference from neighbors causes interference with the powerline network.
• Inconsistent performance:  A halogen lamp to the same circuit, has shown to degrade performance by 30 - 60%; a surge protector on one end of the link saw drops of 15 – 100%; a hair dryer can reduce throughput by 60 – 100%

Conventional consumer Wi-Fi equally sucks.

• Poor range: RF signals weaken with distance lowering their transmission rate
• Performance oscillation: interference and multipath fading result in reduced and unpredictable signal strength, coverage holes and packet errors
• Bandwidth sharing: A single large file transfer can screw with your streaming video
• Multicast: Wi-Fi networks can’t detect Wi-Fi signal quality or transmission errors in multicast mode because there is no frame acknowledgement from the receiver.  IPTV happens to use multicast to deliver scheduled programming to the set-top-boxes

So what's the answer?  If we told you, we'd have to sell you.

Comments

[Alfred]

Interesting site (and even more interesting product I admit !)

My question / curiosity is on your comment on multicast not being a good way to transmit stuff using multicast @ wireless.
Well, one can always handle such errors etc / adjust bit rate, etc w.r.t current channel conditions at user level ? retry imp frame stuff ?

Basic concepts wondering if they dont work out so well in practice or what ?