Powerline vs. Wi-Fi
Used in conjunction with WiFi or as an alternative to WiFi, powerline offers and advantage for speed and reliability.
Powerline Ethernet offers an excellent complement to Wi-Fi, enabling a Wi-Fi access point at any electrical outlet to ensure optimum performance in a home or business. For instance, cable or DSL modems can frequently reside in a remote part of the house (such as a basement, studio/office, or adjacent to an outside wall). Using powerline Ethernet, Wi-Fi users can place the access point in a central location providing better reception across more of the house.
Yet powerline Ethernet also offers many advantages over Wi-Fi. (See Using Powerline Adapters to Extend your WiFi Network)
- Improved coverage: Plaster Networks can offer network access from power receptacles throughout the home, using the existing electrical wires that connect to each room. Wireless, on the other hand, frequently has a more limited range depending on the home and the specific wireless transmitter. Obstacles such as walls, floors, furniture, fixtures, and appliances commonly block wireless transmission that can result in fading and “dead” zones throughout the house.
- Higher reliability: Wi-Fi is unsuitable for high-bandwidth applications such as HDTV given the likelihood of interference, glitches, and network latencies associated with wireless. Wi-Fi can frequently experience jitter because of noise from neighboring wireless networks, cordless phones, baby monitors, microwave ovens, and other appliances. In addition, the software of many Wi-Fi access points introduces latencies that cause unexpected delays and interruptions when watching movies or playing interactive games.
- Improved Security: The Homeplug AV standard uses encryption based on 128-bit AES to ensure the security and privacy of data on the network. And because powerline Ethernet is a wired network, the technology restricts access to units that are plugged into the circuit AND that have the correct encryption key. By comparison, Wi-Fi is susceptible to snooping and spoofing, where unauthorized users gain access to information and devices on the network.
- Ease of Installation/Configuration: Powerline Ethernet is designed for plug and play—simply plug the Plaster Networks adapter into a power receptacle, connect the Ethernet cable, and you’re done. By comparison, Wi-Fi involves a more complex set of steps to get started, requiring the user to provide settings for SSID, security type, encryption type, channel, mode, WEP/WPA, and passphrase. Even with a software “wizard,” configuring a wireless connection can be complicated and frustrating.
