Our new internet system sends signals through the powerlines in our house.

We ended our last chapter about making our home network COVID ready with a tease / cliffhanger about having purchased a TP-Link AV2000 pair to send our internet signal out through the house wiring. The package arrived along with two Cat7 cables we ordered after reading the two cables supplied with the product would be questionable Cat5e or Cat5 or less. Big mistake… more about that below.

The two AV2 Powerline boxes are fairly large. They cover an entire wall receptacle and then some. They also overran most of the power strips we have. After finding a power strip that would accommodate them both, we set about testing. We got them both plugged in, then pushed the buttons to have them sync-up together. Everything going to plan, our new cables linked them from our ethernet switch to AV2 box 1, then our signal goes through the power strip, then it goes into AV2 box 2, out through our second new Cat7 patch cord cable and into a new dongle we bought to test on an old MacBook Air.



We started our SpeedTest.net app and were rewarded with a dismal 8Mbps download speed…and 320Mbps upload speed. What an odd result! What a way to rain on our parade! We took these things out of the box not more than 10 minutes ago. They’re easy to setup, the upload speed is more than we expected, but what is wrong with the download? A break was called for while we debated whether to send these things back or not. It was Saturday before we had a chance to open them, so there was nothing we could immediately do anyway. Let’s check our anger and methodically track down what is going on with these guys.

The fiber optic gateway / router box from the telco is the place to start. We rebooted it with the device still in our ethernet switch. The ethernet switch is just a pass through, so maybe the the fiber optic box had not recognized it and had not assigned it a DHCP address to receive things when we plugged it in the power strip. Reboot. No change. Maybe there are power surge filters, something more than the normal metal oxide varistors, in this power strip that filter between the outlets in the strip. Change strips, then try wall plugs in the same room. Same result - ~8Mbps. This is frustrating!

We are using a dongle that has never been tested with this laptop before. Let's try the dongle on a different computer. Second computer tests good with new dongle on ethernet cable feeding a different computer. Now we know the dongle is good. Next suspect on our hit parade is the new Cat7 cable. Disconnect and re-connect this cable between our known good ethernet switch and one of our known good desktop computers. Black Cat7 cable works okay, plenty of speed on it, so disconnect and sub in the new blue Cat7 cable. It simply sits there. Boom, that's it! The black cable gave us ~450Mbps down. The blue cable gives us 6Mbps. That is our problem! Our advice to you: if you ever buy six dollar Cat7 cables from Amazon — do not — assume the claim ‘rigorously tested’ is true. Cat 7 should be good to 600MHz. Whoever in China tested these must have used an Ohm meter to determine there was no dead short inside the cable — that is about the extent of it. This cable could never have passed any signal much more nervous than DC, Direct Current.

So, we have the two cables shipped with the two TP-Link wall warts. After patching in one of those, the speed needle starts to fly. Our download speed is now 280Mbps in that far room. Our upload speed is still a bit over 300Mbps. It shouldn’t be that fast, but for right now we are in no mood to quibble about that. We just wasted an hour or so on this bad ethernet cable. At the gateway box that comes in the house we get 480Mbps to 500Mbps down fairly regularly. The powerline speed in the same room where the gateway box lives is 96% of what the phone company supplies us, after a five to ten foot run behind the wall through powerline from one socket to the next. That was not our purpose, needed signal at the other end of the house. We had hoped for a speed of at least 100Mbps from this AV2 kit, our goal was the ~150Mbps national average, and our wildest hope was 375Mbps. The house is over 40 years old, the wire run is from one corner on the main floor to about an exact diagonal on the second floor. We are not sure how much wiring is in between, but we can guess it’s something over 100 feet and it passes through the circuit breaker box. Using WiFi we got zero, zip, zilch, nada signal there. Now after spending the amazing sum of $89.99 plus tax we have a download speed that is about 80% faster than the national average speed people using speedtest.net have clocked. We should be happy, right? Okay, yes, we are. We’re over being upset about being so dense as to take so long troubleshooting the bad cable. These powerline boxes work as advertised. In this house they perform when WiFi simply will not, and are a lot cheaper to install than Ethernet cable. They don't have the speed Ethernet does, but we estimated the cost for installing Ethernet to be four times greater. Ninety dollars well spent in our view. Caveat emptor, though, we tested our house with our old cheapie powerline boxes before buying the new, more expensive ones. GFI sockets, surge supressors, multiple breaker boxes, differences in electric wire types, lengths and so on can make these things perform miserably, much like our bad ethernet cable did. Be aware of the pitfalls before you try this approach.

We have another set of boxes coming, a pair of older, lesser spec TP-Link powerline adapters we won at auction on eBay for $18.00 (we didn’t think we’d win, maybe we’ll find out why no one outbid us). We want to install either our old Linksys powerline boxes or this new 18 buck pair in another house in Shelby County that is served by Comcast, the gift we spoke of earlier to extend internet service to a far room in that house. We expect to find a whole bunch of other computer network things going on there, and we shall write to inform you of how our old powerline boxes work there, and what we think of Xfinity in Shelby County.

We use SpeedTest apps by Ookla. You may have a different preference, but remember to use the same test consistently - make apples-to-apples comparisons.

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.