Will a "better" homeplug help me?
 

Hi,

We switched to Virgin 50meg last week and since then my media centre extender either won't connect at all, or doesn't stay connected long enough to be of any use.

Also, my p2p program (utorrent) kills off my internet connection when it gets up to a certain d/l rate. None of this ever happened with the lower speed service we had from Sky.

My dlink dir615 router is next to the modem downstairs at the front of the house. It is connected to the DMA2200 media centre extender via ethernet cable. A devolo high speed 85mbps homeplug runs from the router to the mains and another one feeds my main pc, which is upstairs at the back of the house (where else!). The router also serves my wife's laptop wirelessly, and another homeplug serves my sons xbox upstairs. All this was fine before Virgin.



I spoke to tech support today, and I think we narrowed down the problem to the homeplugs themselves - that they can't cope with the higher bandwidth - but after I hung up and thought about it for a while I'm not so sure. The homeplugs are 85mbps - surely they can cope with the 50meg broadband? Would 200mbps homeplugs do the job?

I hope someone can help! I'm reluctant to buy more homeplugs if that's not really where the problem is, particularly as I've just bought a new router thinking that that was the problem!

Re: Will a "better" homeplug help me?
 

I'm not sure about the disconnecting, but 85mbps homeplugs are not sufficient for 50 mbps Broadband. The overheads of the homeplug protocol are quite high, and I get a maximum throughput of about 20 meg out of my 85mbps homeplugs. 15 meg is more realistic. Faster homeplugs might help, but I'm not sure what the realistic throughput for the 200mbps one is.

Re: Will a "better" homeplug help me?
 

Nearly 12,000 posts!?! wow! :D

Earlier today I discovered that when utorrent crashes my internet, instead of running downstairs to restart the router I could just unplug the homeplug and plug it in again and it would be back up in seconds (certainly saves my legs!). That suggested that the problem was the homeplug, and then tech support also said that so I gues that's what the problem is, so I'm halfway to solving it. Thanks for confirming my suspicions about the 85mbps homeplugs.

200mbps is the biggest type of homeplug, right? A quick google has revealed that the throughput on the zyxel 200mbps system is about 100mbps - would that be enough?

Re: Will a "better" homeplug help me?
 

If the throughput on the 200mbps one is indeed 100 mbps, then I would imagine they should work. Then again, I don't use Torrents and don't have 50mb, so I may not be the best person to answer that question.

Nearly 12,000 posts, and all of them quality :blush:

Re: Will a "better" homeplug help me?
 

I just found some fairly cheap ones on Amazon and a lot of the reviews place the throughput at 100, 130 even up to 175mbps so it looks like they'll do the trick.

Thanks for your help! I've been tearing my hair out thinking the router was the problem

Re: Will a "better" homeplug help me?
 

try limiting the utorrent upstream as it's normally upstream not downstream saturation that causes the problems.

Re: Will a "better" homeplug help me?
 

Thanks for the tip. I tried doing that this morning and it doesn't seem to have lost connection since. (yay!)

So now I'm torn between 2 replacement homeplug products. The cheap one on Amazon has no brand name, just "max value" and costs £68.00, or there's the devolo option which is another £25 and is the brand I've been using happily for years.

I think I may have just answered my own question...

Re: Will a "better" homeplug help me?
 

Just a little update...

It did indeed work. The 200mbps homeplugs allow everything to work happily, although my son hasn't checked out his xbox yet, and that is still connected via an older 85mbps homeplug. But if he's not interested then neither am I! :)

Re: Will a "better" homeplug help me?
 

Good to hear :tu: Did you go for the Devolos or the unbranded ones?

Also: what throughput are you getting when moving large files over your network?