Powerlines: what speed do you get?

[maxmaxmax]

I’m considering signing up to fibre 500 or 1TB.

Does any of you use TP-Link powerline adapters with your Virgin Fibre? What speeds do you get?

Thanks!

[Tudor]

I would never recommend powerline adapters, a lot depends on your household wiring and you signal also gets broadcast to neighbours on the same phase,. It’s always best to run Ethernet cables, they can easily be hidden.

[jhuk]

And they are instantly Half Duplex, the VM ones had a Link Speed of 400 (should be 433 in reality) so you're going to get far lower than 400Mb/s in real life use, the newer POD's have the same Link Speed as the HUB3/4 so 866, which will get you about 600Mb/s in real life use if close enough to get a strong signal.

[maxmaxmax]

Thanks, do you mean it’s best to get the VM powerline adaptors than the half duplex TP-Link?

[jhuk]

No Powerlines are old hat and no longer given out, you want the new Inteligent WIFI POD's which are now all SuperPOD's (2 ports) or should be as Plume discontinued the basic POD's (1port).

Look at my post here: Solved: Re: Max Speed intelligent wifi pod - Page 2 - Virgin Media Community - 5094102

[maxmaxmax]

I see. What if I don't want WiFi? Are MoCA adapters a good solution?

[Tudor]

No MoCA adapters are not recommended, very few are in use in the UK and reported to not be very good. As said before there is nothing like an Ethernet cable, it will even go up to 10G.

[jbrennand]

I am not disagreeing at all with Tudor but.... my lad is a serious internet gamer who thinks wifi is the work of Satan and should never be used for gaming. As said... Ethernet cabling your devices is always the best way to go, but running cable up to his room was problematic at that time.

So he bought a pair of Solwise AC1200 powerline adapters. His PC/Xbox/PS3 can now all be "wired" - with short Cat6 cables – back to the wireless router downstairs and he gets a solid 40-60Mbps on our V200 package - and he hasn't complained once in years!

Worth considering whether that will work for your house on your mains circuits, the two circuits must go through the same consumer unit/fuse box (most do) and be free of any "noise". You can also add a wifi access point alongside to boost that up there as well.

And although the speeds will always be attenuated and this might compromise your connection and activities.... it may not matter - depending on what its for.

But to go full circle.... running an ethernet cable from your router is definitely the gold standard 🙂

[maxmaxmax]

Thank you. But would it safe to assume that if say one gets 1Gb speeds ethernet and through powerline it drops to 500Mb, it still is very good to get?

Meaning, despite the big drop, the faster service the faster to a powerline?

[jbrennand]

Depends what you are doing. Download Speed isnt the whole story - see Andrews comments in this thread

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Speed/What-bb-speed-to-simply-stream-4k-movies/td-p/4863993

Gamers want low latency, low ping time, no packet drops and good upload speeds. But VM DOCSIS technology is not as good for that.