This is actually a much shorter post about Powerline Networking i.e. the power hungry adapters you can get to transport Ethernet over your power sockets. This is nearly the worst type of wired networking you can do, but it’s still proper wired networking and therefore of a different class to wireless networking (which is fundamentally less reliable). You would never fit Powerline Networking anywhere you have a choice e.g. if you own your own house, just fit Ethernet or Fibre. But if you rent and you’re not allowed to drill holes in your walls and roof, Powerline can be a reasonable solution – and it is better than Wifi in terms of reliability and consistency.
Powerline Networking
We fitted Homeplug AV1 500? into this rented house shortly after we moved in in 2013 precisely because I needed to get the internet from where the vDSL modem is (next to the front door) to where everything else is without problems caused by the very crowded 2.4Ghz Wifi dropping out due to us living within high density former council housing. That did work well, but the AV1’s would drop out any time the microwave turned on plus they were well slower than the vDSL connection (70 Mbps at the time). I therefore got my first set of AV2’s in 2014, they were AV2 600’s and they were still a bit slower than the vDSL connection, but impervious to microwaves so that was a win. Annoyed by losing internet speed, I then splurged on my first set of AV2 1200’s in 2015 and they were finally faster than my vDSL, as they could do about 100 Mbps in terms of TCP transfer bandwidth. And that’s where I stopped, as there is no point fitting something faster than your external network. And, in fairness, those AV2 1200’s have been utterly trouble free for ten years now. They ‘just work’.
About one month ago, our internet went totally dead. Out came the Eircom guy, he fitted a new line, which turned out to be flaky with the best connection speed at about 20 - 30 Mbps and it constantly dropping out. We had the exact same problem when we first moved in, and I had the Eircom guy out like a yoyo to fix it until they finally found some combination of wiring which was fairly stable – you’d still get occasional outages for a few minutes, but it was liveable and you generally got about 90 Mbps. To be honest, 90 Mbps is plenty enough internet for most use cases – you don’t need more, it’s now a ‘nice to have’ if it’s more. Indeed, if anything, the biggest issue now with vDSL is latency, you get an extra 10 milliseconds with vDSL or so for those few hundred metres to the cabinet which is a significant chunk of the total latency to anywhere in Europe.
I wasn’t in the mood to go through that circus again with getting Eircom constantly out to fiddle with the vDSL, so I looked into getting fibre installed into the home. I had fibre installed into the site last year where to avoid the install fee, you needed to sign up to a 24 month contract. Seeing as I very seriously hope that we are out of here a year from now, that would be a non-starter however thankfully only a year later, now the minimum contract length to get free installation has dropped to twelve months. So I signed up!
Fibre to the Home (FTTH)
Fibre to the home is interesting stuff. Your traditional analogue phone line is a twisted pair of copper (and often copper coated aluminium in Ireland) cables between the cabinet and your house. It arrives into your house as maybe a 3 mm diameter cable. What fibre to the home does is physically replace that cable with an identical one, but with a fibre optic cable within instead. The big advantage of this is one to one physical compatibility – often reusing the existing hole in the wall as you simply pull out the old cable and push in the new cable. You can reuse the same terminating enclosure in the wall, same fixings from your roof to the pole etc.
In fact, fibre to the home is probably the only place where multi-mode rather than single-mode fibre is going to survive into the long term. Multi-mode fibre shines multiple frequencies of light down a single fibre, whereas single-mode shines exactly one frequency. My future house uses dual channel single-mode fibre throughout – it is nowadays same price as multi-mode as the fibre has become so cheap, and if you can run a fibre for each direction, then single-mode fibre is superior in every way. My very cheap 2.5 Gbps fibre transducers will do 10 km of fibre or so, so they’re way overkill, and with more powerful transducers you can do 10 Gbps over 100 km without issue. The multi-mode fibre used in FTTH swaps the ability to carry multiple signals within a single fibre for far shorter distances – 10 Gbps might only work over 550 metres or so – but now you can pack multiple links into each fibre. Run half a dozen fibres per cable from the cabinet to the pole, and you can give each home off that pole up to 10 Gbps each. As all vDSL connections are within hundreds of metres from the cabinet, multi-mode fibre really shines as a direct substitute in this case.
Anyway, this Monday they’ll be swapping my analogue cable to the pole outside for a fibre cable to the same pole and then I’ll have a 500 Mbps internet connection (which is the lowest still available in Ireland for fibre). Obviously a Powerline Network able to do only 100 Mbps would mean giving up most of the internet speed once again, so that’s what motivated me to look into the latest and greatest in Powerline technology to see what has replaced my AV2 1200’s.
G.hn
It turns out that there has been no replacement for AV2 in the past ten years! In fact, the AV2 consortium wound itself up in 2018, considering its work ‘done’. Their last AV2 release was AV2 2000 to supersede 1200, but as https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/charts/powerline/view/ shows, it’s actually slower than the 1200 for short to medium distances and only really improves long distances.
There is however a new kid on the block: G.hn, which stands for ‘Gigabit Home Networking’. It has a very different lineage. It was originally for putting ethernet over analogue telephone wires i.e. rather like vDSL, and it’s much closer to vDSL in terms of implementation though still quite different.
That smallnetbuilder list of benchmarks above does show a G.hn entry, and it’s slower than AV2 1200. But not by much – 120 Mbps vs 160 Mbps. What has changed since is that there is a newer edition of G.hn called ‘Wave 2’ which uses MIMO, whereas original G.hn only used SISO. So it should now be rather faster than before. Unfortunately, there is a real lack of anything empirical on the internet about G.hn Wave 2. There are no reviews at all comparing different technologies on the same network. Some folk on Reddit and Amazon reviews were positive, some were negative. There was nothing conclusive – which is why I have written all this up, because nobody seems to have done any actual side by side testing despite that G.hn Wave 2 products landed in 2021 or so.
Benchmarking G.hn vs Homeplug AV2
I took a punt on a G.hn Wave 2 kit, once again from TP-Link, and I swapped the existing TP-Links identically for the new ones with an identical network and identical testing. It should be mentioned that I have two AV2 networks in the home, and I only replaced one of them for the testing, so the power cables are ‘noisy’ with traffic from the other AV2 network. I should also mention that I explicitly disabled vDSL compatibility for both AV2 and G.hn, which defaults to on for both, and I disabled power saving for both.
| PHY TX | PHY RX | iperf TX | iperf RX | Efficiency | ping TX | ping RX | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Homeplug AV2 1200 | 387 Mbps | 426 Mbps | 75.7 Mbps | 93.6 Mbps | ~20% | 6 ms | 5 ms |
| G.hn 2400 | 731 Mbps | 920 Mbps | 230 Mbps | 296 Mbps | ~30% | 14 ms | 3 ms |
That is about three times faster for TCP bandwidth than before, which is quite impressive. The ping times get better in one direction, but much worse in the other. Weird, though it could be the other AV2 network interfering.
It looks like I’ll get about half of my shiny new 500 Mbps fibre connection, which is still three times better than the vDSL when it was at its best. Probably more importantly, ten milliseconds should be lopped off latencies, meaning that the internet will ‘feel’ much faster.
And I guess we’re not moving out now until April 2026!
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