Our home network systems -
Sending our internet connection
into the electric breaker box.

When last we left our story of building a Covid19 ready work-learn at home computer network we had become more than a little irritated because our WiFi radio simply threw away half of that expensive speed after passing through two walls. So we replaced it with an ethernet cable running along the baseboard between the rooms. We then plugged into a switch to have 7 ports of internet in the second room. We used one port for our streaming TV Roku box, one port each for two different computers, and dedicated the remaining ports to our laptops. Our speeds for all machines in the second room are nearly the same - a 1 to 3 per cent loss - as the speeds in the room with our modem / router boxes.

We also added some ethernet dongle devices to feed our laptops with internet via Thunderbolt or USB. Now all our computers are running quickly, they create no traffic jams. Our 2.4 GHz WiFi band is left for talking smart speakers, doorbell cameras, smart thermostats, and maybe a smart fridge or whatever new device we next discover we can’t live without. There is a problem, though, it’s upstairs. Our faster 5.0 GHz band barely penetrates it, our longer ranger 2.4 band is pitifully slow up there. We have one room where we often get no connection. Yes, we have tried a WiFi extender. We were disappointed. They do extend the range, but basically cut the speed in half. It’s not a good recipe for video conferences. So we have a choice of WiFi or wires to reach the upstairs. Here are our options.

WiFi

Our 5.0 band will not penetrate the floor/ceiling with anything more that 50% of the speed it has downstairs. We have seen demo’s of mesh Gen 6 - 802.11ax devices - which move signal through floors and walls with alacrity. But we also notice that we need to plunk down well over $1000.00 to achieve such benefits across the entire house with four nodes. What’s more we never gain the full benefit of these wonder machines until we upgrade our computers to Gen 6 WiFi. We have no desire to sink mega bucks into 5 or 6 new computers, and no add-on USB external Gen 6 WiFi radios are available as of yet. Let’s explore other options.

Ethernet cable

We had great results running 50 feet of Cat 7 ethernet cable downstairs. Things get a little tricky when running it upstairs. The modem is on an outside wall, the wall filled with insulation. It’s not easy fishing a wire down through that stuff. Instead, we’d need to run cable over to an inside wall, then up the empty space between the studs and the wall board. Ethernet carries 5 volts at 2 tenths of an amp. That’s about the power of a AA battery. It’s hardly a fire hazard, but we know if ever there was a fire and our insurance company learned of our DIY non-licensed electrician wiring, we would have a huge problem collecting on our homeowners policy. We have a great guy, he’s licensed, he does wiring for us, but his fee is going to be at least $400 in labor, plus another 50 to 75 bucks for cable, junction boxes, connectors, etc for the vertical move. There will then be more money involved to spread the signal around upstairs from the room directly above the modem. What else can we do? Well, there are other wires already running through our walls. We have cable from cable TV and we have the electrical wiring that brings power to the sockets on the walls.

Cable wiring

There is a standard called MoCA which is designed to move internet signals through your house on your existing cable TV coax, and to do so at speeds that are about as fast as ethernet. Two of these devices cost slightly under $200. You must also add on another 10 to 15 dollars in low pass filters to keep your internet data from spreading throughout the entire neighborhood’s TV cables. It’s the third bunch of wiring gizmos that bother us. We know that the MoCA boxes typically operate in the UHF broadcast TV range - ~470 to ~800 MHz, and also in the C and Ku Band satellite receiver block conversion output range of ~950 to ~1450 MHz. We also know that our house was wired for cable a very long time ago. Back then, cable TV systems did not go above 450 or 500 MHz, so the connectors, the cable itself and also the splitters that shared the signal from the wall where it entered the house to all the various rooms where a cable connector box was in the wall are suspect. The cable itself may greatly inhibit the internet signal, but the splitters may be a brick wall. We know they are there, we do not know where. Remember we pledged not to employ any expensive test equipment in this project, so we can’t play games with a time domain reflectometer to guesstimate where the splitters might be, nor can we “sweep” our cables with a spectrum analyzer / fast Fourier transform and find out how much signal strength (the stuff that gives us speed and distance) we are going to lose at the frequencies where MoCA devices operate. The splitters are 10 to 14 bucks a piece. That’s a little spendy but not a deal breaker. What is, though, is the thought of struggling across the attic or crawl space. We’re too old for that. We did 'cut the cord' a few years ago, so watch TV by either antennas or Netflix kinds of streaming. So, let’s hold off on costing out new TV cable coax installation and put the MoCA on the back burner while we check out our final alternative.

Power lines

We have power lines all over the house. They run to sockets in the wall where we plug in our lights and appliances. Why not send signals along these wires? Three problems - 1) There’s already a signal there, it’s the 60 cycle alternating current waveform. 2) There are appliance motors in the house (like blenders) that throw crazy amounts of noise along the power line. Remember when you watched off-air TV and a cake mixer started up in the kitchen? You get the idea. Zero internet signal shall pass while that motor is running. No video for you! 3) Out of phase signals. Basic American house wiring has 2 incoming hot phases or legs, and 1 return line. Each incoming phase has ~110 volts. Tie the 2 incoming together to get 220 volts for your dryer, stove, water heater, etc. Use one of the 110 lines to the return for the wall socks, lights, TV, etc. See the problem yet? Your breaker panel has two different 110 phases. If you send a signal on one phase, how does that signal get to another wall outlet on the second phase? The answer is may be poorly or not at all. This is near 50 year old technology. Long ago, people jumped the two phases with 600 volt capacitors. That passed the signal, but it could also pass a fair amount of wattage to you if you were replacing an outlet or switch and had only disabled one breaker, not all of them. The capacitor could deal out enough electricity to cause serious health problems. And yet, old Cisco / Linksys ethernet to power line devices are on eBay for $35 or so. If we get one and it works, we’re way ahead. If it works slowly we know someone who needs a 5 to 10Mbps internet connection on the other side of their house, it’s a present. If we run into phasing problems in our house it goes back on eBay with huge caveats and other warnings.

Running on junk yard parts

So we bought our Linksys PL 400 pair of wall warts on eBay. They’re 9 year old devices which set us back $38.56 with tax and freight. The seller assures us they have been tested to work. Maybe they only streamed cooking shows for a sweet, elderly lady on Sundays. Anyway, out of the box with them, then plug them into adjacent sockets in the same room. The setup is simple, once in the socket a power light goes on indicating we should press their encryption linking buttons. This link handshake means they’ll forevermore talk at 128 bit security. The signal only goes as far as the houses on the same side of the electric company’s transformer. A transformer is two unconnected coils so it’s a dead stop wall for our messages. There are two other houses on our line, our next door neighbors, so the security is roughly equal to WiFi. Besides, why would they ever guess we’re sending them free Netflix to their wall sockets if they can only decrypt it. We plugged one box into our router, and the other box got a cable to our Chromebook. Amazing! They worked, we’re online! Using our Ookla Speedtest app we got approximately 50 Mbps avg. from a number of tests. Now let’s see if we can actually use these things. We carted the second box up to our far end of the house upstairs room. This room gives our WiFi fits. Many times we cannot log in at all. When we do connect, we get 2 to 5 Mbps speeds. We move up there, and plug in our Linksys box, then test. It works…and it gives us 27 to 30 Mbps speeds! It’s not much compared to the 500 Mbps we started with, but way better than WiFi gave us. We have 4 ethernet ports on this Linksys box, so we can probably do a Zoom conference, stream a SD movie, send email, and make a VOIP phone call simultaneously. What’s more important is that we have pioneered a new internet highway inside our house. It’s only a two lane asphalt road, but it takes traffic off the faster routes.

Our system is basically only as fast as its slowest link, so this low speed road may still bite us when all our traffic is combined inside the router / modem. We know that one 4K video stream requires at least 25 Mbps. That slow link could bring down our network by effectively locking up our router if just one computer on it streamed a 4K video. But that sort of video will be some time away. Enthused by our far room results we go shopping to compare and price other, newer power line adapters. After reading a bunch of specs, and articles, plus eyeballing a lot of YouTube backyard “science” tests we decide to try a TP-Link AV2000 pair. They’re $97.89 with shipping and tax from Amazon. If we get the results that the YouTubers and PC magazine types report, we’ll get 70 to 80 per cent of our original speed in that far room. For us, that would be about 375 Mbps. We doubt that’s possible. According to Speedtest.net the average test run on their system in the USA is 143 Mbps down and 56 Mbps up. We’d consider that a good number to achieve in the far room. Actually, in economic terms, as the new device is roughly three times the price as our used Linksys boxes, even achieving 100 Mbps download speed would be reasonable. We’re beginning to sound like kids at Christmas. Our new purchase arrives this coming Wednesday, we’ll give you a report on it then. If all fails with this thing, they have a 30 day money back promise. Meantime we can jigger the QoS type settings inside our router to limit the use of this slow lane, old Linksys system to nights and weekends so it never interferes with the important business and education tasks during the day, but does give us better upstairs internet service than we've ever had before at night.






Exploring the magic of mesh WiFi - good gains for minimal effort, just pay the price.

Sorting out a Comcast modem / router and its WiFi - then replacing it.

Stringing ethernet? Using cable TV cable, or house wiring?

How much internet speed do we really need?

Sending our internet connection into the electric breaker box.

Big gains by simple means.

Bringing our slowest devices up to speed.

Our WiFi radio is way too slow.

Our WiFi home network has become a hinderance.

Why this information from a law firm?

How, you might ask, does a law firm have any bona fides in this subject matter. A staff member whose first encounter with the digital world was Fortran on a Univac, followed by IMSAI CP/M S-100 bus, manufacturing using 3870 Mostek microcontrollers (2 kilo bytes of onboard ROM!) then 6805 & HC11 Motorola, Intel 8051, etc. etc... for years... plus a few US patents involving RF devices along the way in these areas is our credential. When the isolation happened this year, we realized we could and should help our clients stay current with their health & safety isolation and distancing needs while we worked with them on their family, estate and tax law matters. So you see above the kind of --additional -- advice and service we have been dispensing over the past months.