How good/bad is powerline networking, especislly with more than two devices?

[Chris Green]

But doesn't mesh mean that client devices will 'roam' transparently, whereas adding wired WiFi access points won't do this (i.e. it's down to the client, or me, to change WiFi connection).

[Andy Burns]

I think the powerline units equate to the ports on an old style repeater hub with the mains cable being their stretched out "bus"

[T i m]

To add to that, I think the ports might all look like basic 'hub' (bridging, rather than repeating) ports, via the bus as you said?

Cheers, T i m

[Tim+]

Don?t forget the advantage of a single SSID for wireless connection. That?s been a huge boon for us.

Tim

[Tim+]

Exactly.

Before we had the mesh system we had to have a homeplug Wi-Fi access point in our bedroom to get adequate coverage there. The problem was though that our bedroom is at the front of the house and our phones would always latch on to it whenever we drove into the driveway. We?d find then that when when we passed trough to the back of he house and our main living areas, our phones would hang on like grim death to the bedroom access point despite a much stronger signal from the router in the hall downstairs.

We were always having to manually switch our access from one to the other manually. If got to be a real pain in the arse.

Tim

[T i m]

Wouldn't you simply set the SSID and password on all AP's to the same so that clients could / would reconnect to the loudest AP as required (when reconnecting) albeit not the same handover as on a full system?

No user intervention required though or was that what you were talking about above?

Cheers, T i m

[David Wade]

Also as current practice moves away from ring mains to radial systems (or at least smaller rings) with perhaps multiple RCBOs you may find that performance becomes limited because the couls in the RCBOs filter the signal...

Dave

[The Natural Philosopher]

They do work across some MCBS. IIRC mine is working across one. Maybe. Not sure

[The Natural Philosopher]

And stay on the stronger more remote devicees and not reconnect to the nearer ones that have less multipath?

More ridiculous myths

[The Natural Philosopher]

Basically yes.

What is technically known as a 'bridge'

[The Natural Philosopher]

Don?t forget the advantage of a single SSID for clueless idiots..

[Andy Burns]

I think of "hubs" as repeaters, not as switches (aka multiport bridges) but it's loose terminology

except the odd-ball dual speed hubs which are a 10Mb hub and a 100Mb hub in a box, with a 2 port switch between them.

[Chris Green]

I think the difference is that with mesh the handover is forced/encouraged by the mesh 'routers' whereas otherwise it's down to the client system and they don't, in general, move from WiFi to WiFi very easily.

[Andy Burns]

do you think the powerline units have learn/forward/drop capability?

I assumed they just repeated everything they got, onto the wire, in-case something else might want to see it, thought they were dumb? IEEE 1901 doesn't say much on the subject, but does say it uses CSMA/CD i.e. the bad old thin-wire ethernet single collision domain detection.

[Chris Green]

You can have a single SSID without mesh. It's the way I have my two Draytek routers set up, both have the same SSID and password. Clients do move from one to the other without my intervention but not as easily as one would hope.

[Tim+]

Well yes, but the downside of using the same SSID with multiple access points is that you can?t quickly see which access point your device is pigheadedly sticking with rather than migrating to a stronger one. ;-)

Tim

[T i m]

<snip>

Yes, that was my thought when you said what you did. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

Agreed.

Or can be used loosely. ;-)

The first commercial network I installed used an 8 port Thin Ethernet Repeater where there was just bridging between each of the ports. Therefore, any traffic between say a client and server on one port would impact the performance between similar on another [1]. But hey,

10Mbps was a step up from the 1Mbps of the Corvus Omninet (One) system it grew out of. ;-)

Each segment could be manually isolated via a front panel mounted switch. ;-)

Yah.

Cheers, T i m

[1] It was surprising how quickly / well some of the users could detect if I was say running a server backup during office hours. ;-)

[Andy Burns]

DEMPR?

[The Natural Philosopher]

It is essentially thin wire ethernet using the mains instead of coax.

OK as a P to P link but no good as a whole network

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