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Powerline adapters. Just bought another one for my Apple TV ,which was cutting out a lot recently..


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Make sure it's plugged directly into the wall, not into a power strip or extension lead. The signal degrades badly if you do - the cheap wiring used in those was never designed to carry data at high speed. :)

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[quote name='tonybassplayer' timestamp='1400418185' post='2453606']
Are they like a wifi booster to get a better signal in different parts of the house ?
[/quote]

No. It's one of those things that sounds like it shouldn't work but does. I have a couple in my house. They plug into to mains sockets and actually use the mains wiring to send your connection that way. It means everything is wired (which I prefer to wireless), but without having to have loads of cabling round the house. The boxes have Cat5 on the end to connect your devices.

Edited by Mr Arkadin
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They work well. And they'll usually work when plugged into an extension lead or power strip too, if necessary (sometimes there is no option).

One thing to watch out for, though - and this happened to me. I have a pair of TP-LINK powerline adaptors so connect the PC in my son's bedroom. It all worked perfectly until new people move into the house next door (we're semi-detached). After that the connection to the PC was a bit flaky at times. I didn't think much of it initially but after complaints that the PC wouldn't connect I investigated.

I opened up a web browser on the PC and got a "BT Homehub" login page. That was strange.... our internet provider is TalkTalk so we don't have a BT Homehub in the house. I dug a bit deeper and discovered that my son's PC was trying to connect to next door's internet connection !!

More investigation followed and I discovered that they also had a pair of TP-LINK powerline adaptors next door - and both sets were "talking" to each other through the mains wiring of the houses !! Well the mains wiring goes back to to a fuse box in each house and then to common wiring provided by the electricity provider - there's nothing to stop a network signal travelling back a distance along those cables.

Fortunately the TP-LINK adaptors do come with a utility program that allows you to create a "private" network that cannot be seen by anyone else, so once I set this up then the problem was solved.

But it's something worth thinking about if you used those in a work environment with "sensitive" data on your network !

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I've moved over to 802.11ac WiFi and I get faster speeds than powerline networking. Got a free BT Homehub 5 router upgrade just by phoning BT and signing up for an additional 12 months contract, then got a couple of Asus WiFi adapters cheap off eBay. Getting about 500mbps from downstairs to my main machine upstairs at the other end of the house!

Now selling a pair of powerline adapters I suppose!

Edited by dannybuoy
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[quote name='BOD2' timestamp='1400425650' post='2453678']
They work well. And they'll usually work when plugged into an extension lead or power strip too, if necessary (sometimes there is no option).
[/quote]

Yes, I've found them to be very reliable and use them for streaming music with no problems.

My understanding against using an extension lead/power strip is that the signal will degrade, error correction workload increases, so the throughput speed goes down. I'd expect video streaming to be the first to suffer, then music then general use, but you might not notice for general internet browsing.

It can't do any harm to try though because these things are highly variable.

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[quote name='Mr Arkadin' timestamp='1400424605' post='2453667']


No. It's one of those things that sounds like it shouldn't work but does. I have a couple in my house. They plug into to mains sockets and actually use the mains wiring to send your connection that way. It means everything is wired (which I prefer to wireless), but without having to have loads of cabling round the house. The boxes have Cat5 on the end to connect your devices.
[/quote]

I see. This may help us though to hard wire up to our skybox. Must look in to this soon.

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We've got 3 TP-Link home plug things here and they work really well. Hardly any issues with them. We got the ones with the mains plug socket on the front, so we don't loose any sockets.
Ours are the lower end versions, so the PC's hooked up to them don't get the same speed as my main PC that's wired directly to the hub, but then I can't have the kids hogging all my bandwidth ;-)

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Update; watched about 2 hours of netflix on Apple TV, and all seems well.
On a slight tangent regarding bt ; I find the best way to talk to them is ' live chat' . On the bt website .They then talk to you on phone .
2 nd thing: bt infinity is still not in my area,( should've had it last summer ). Now infinity 3 is advertised wtf?!?

Edited by RAY AGAINST THE MACHINE
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