Easy High-Speed Networking for Apartments
How are we going to get network access all the way over there?
For those living in apartments, getting network access to all parts of the apartment usually means wireless, and most of the time, that’s just peachy if you need a connection to watch youtube in the living room. Let’s say that you have an XBox360 or another Media Center Extender, how are you going to stream Heroes in HD to your living room? Wireless connections are too unreliable and slow for that kind of data and you can’t run a network cable clear across the apartment because people/animals will trip/chew on it.
There is another option! Powerline networking, which in the simplest of terms, allows you to run your network over the electrical wiring in your home, rather than ethernet cabling or wireless. Setting a powerline network up is easier than setting up a wireless network, literally this is all you have to do:
- Take one adapter, plug it into an open AC outlet
- Plug a network cable into the adapter and connect it to the computer/router/Xbox
- Do the same thing on the other end
- By the time you are able to start a web browser to test the network connection, the adapters will have established a connection - effectively creating a “virtual network cable”.
The powerline adapters (PLAs) are effectively transparent to your network, letting you “set it and forget it”.
Advanced Powerline Networking
Let’s say that you’ve gotten your network going and you tried to stream Heroes in HD to your XBox360, but the results were less than impressive; you might have been getting the messages from the XBox saying that you were having network problems, the video was stuttery and generally messed up. Here are a couple of things you can do to fix it:
When you are running the XBox360 as Media Center Extender, there is nifty widget if you go to the Tasks section, called “Tune Network”. Launch it and go to the Graph section. At that point, the XBox will be trying to simulate the type of network traffic necessary for extending and the line on the graph will show you what kind of video quality you can expect to get.
- See if there are any other open AC outlets (you did plug your PLAs directly into the wall didn’t you?) nearby - keep in mind that you will have to reestablish the extender session. For me, what seems to work is to get the PLAs as close as possible to one another (if you have an option).Keep moving them around till you can get as high an average quality level as possible.
- Once that has been optimized, we have to examine the medium that the PLAs are trying to transmit through. Depending on the quality and age of the wiring in your house or apartment,you may be suffering from electrical ‘noise’ on the lines. Generally, the best way to find it is to leaving the “Tune Network” graph running and start turning stuff off in your apartment. The worst offenders are usually going to be fluorescent lights, hair dryers, refrigerators, and big printers. (This site has some good information on noise and how to find it)
- I found in my apartment that one of the worst sources of noise for the PLAs was a light fixture on the other side of the wall from one of the PLAs, turning it off sent my network quality shooting back up in the “Acceptable for HD” range.
Picking Out Your Powerline Adapter
As far as what products to choose, I have worked with both of these units, and excluding some firmware differences, they are virtually the same product:
The key things to look for when actually picking out a Powerline Networking kit is to make sure that you pick the right technology, Powerline HD products are suitable for streaming high-def content, while the older technology (usually just Powerline, not HD) will not handle high-def content.
Leave a Reply