I admit, I buy things all the time that I don’t need.  It’s a problem I’ve had for as long as I can remember, and I don’t think I’ll ever change that.  The bonus to this is that occasionally I’ll purchase a gadget that works enough that I can recommend it to other people.  Even better is when it works and solves a huge problem that I have.

Two birds with one gadget is a good thing.

I was browsing on Amazon and came across the Panasonic BL-PA100KTA HD-PLC Ethernet Adaptor Starter Pack.  This is a long set of words that equates to “use your electrical wires as ethernet cables”.  What made me purchase it was the fact that Amazon had it for US $40.98.

Now, this usually retails for around $100, and that makes it a touch out of the “let’s buy it and figure out if it is something that really works or if it will be relegated to the Hall of Shame”.  However, at $40, it becomes a beacon where I feel a need to see if it will work.

Enough rambling, now for what I planned on using it for and why.

I live in a condo.  Everyone around me has the same idea that I do: I want internet everywhere.  This is a problem.  A very big problem.

I own a D-Link 802.11g router which promises extended range and better transfer speeds.  I was a big fan of both when I bought it to upgrade my old wireless router, and at first I was impressed.

Then reality came crashing down.  When they said extended range, they meant when there weren’t 20+ other AP’s in the same area destroying eachother in a wireless version of “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome”.  Inteference was so bad that the bandwidth barely carried my low resolution videos from the file server to my HTPC box.

Combine this with constant drop outs and you have the perfect recipe for a heart attack.

Well, I have been suffering through this Hell for a few months now.  I purchased a .9TB HDD (yes, that’s right Maxtor, I’m up to speed on your base 10 shenanigans) and managed to get all the videos on it so that I could atleast utilize the HTPC for something other than looking pretty and IRC.

Now I have two repositories for my videos.  The dedicated server which houses everything I have and is constantly updated, and an external HDD that has to be synced every so often.  This is a complete pain in the a** that I don’t want to deal with anymore.  I didn’t spend $3,000+ for a file server that isn’t performing its job.

So, my options are:

1. Run 100 feet (30m) of CAT 5E cable up the stairs from the central switch. (Not even close to a good idea…roommate would kill me)
2. Run the cable through the walls in a proper manner and terminate it in the bedroom to a wall outlet. (My landlord would kill me…rental)
3. Try this Power Line Communication thing and see if it works.

Since I’m not partial to death, I went with option 3.

Normally, I include some great looking photos with these reviews, but I apologize ahead of time: these are pretty bad.

Panasonic BL-PA100KTA Installation

From Panasonic:

The HD-PLC Ethernet Adaptor turns every power outlet in the house into an Internet access point. Just like plugging an electric cord into the outlet, you insert the HD-PLC Ethernet Adaptor plug and you’re ready to log on to the Internet. It’s a super-easy home network, with no need for complicated cables…

…There’s no tricky installation or complicated settings. Just take the BL-PA100KT out of the box and plug it into the power outlet. Set up the other equipment on the network, such as routers and PCs, as described in their respective instructions. Adding more HD-PLC Ethernet Adaptors is easy too, using the quick 3-step procedure shown here.

The 3-step procedure is to plug in the “master” and “terminal” boxes to the same AC outlet, push the “setup” button on both (which is on the top of the box), then move them around to your hearts content.

Now, I like to think I’m intelligent, but sometimes I tend to not read the directions.  I still figured it out, and managed to eliminate a step in the process.  But that’s another story for another day.

I plugged in both the boxes to the same outlet, pressed the setup button on both, and started to figure out where in the hell I was going to plug these guys in at.  Almost all the plugs are being used near my switch and router which made trying to find a good place to plug it in at a problem, but, alas, I found a virginal outlet not more than a few feet from the router.  It was in the living room.

Now, I unplugged the “terminal” box, leaving the “master” box plugged in near the source of the internet and network and moved to my bedroom where the HTPC box is located at.  This is where we started having some problems.

I plugged in the “terminal” box in the room, and ran all the appropriate cables on both boxes.  I should have a connection to the home network to the router with no problems…but this was not true.

So, with a slight breath of annoyance, I left the “terminal” box connected to the HTPC, and started to figure out where I could plug in the “master” box and still be close enought to either the switch or router so I could become one with the LAN.

After a few minutes of moving things around, I found an outlet with a decent surge-protecter and line-filterer plugged in, and I decided to give it a try.  Virginal wall outlets were at a premium, so this would have to do.

It worked.

So, without much more fussing around with the controller, I started testing out the connection to see exactly what I could do with it, and what would be completely idiotic to try.

Download the Internet (543MB)

I downloaded a copy of Mythbuntu 8.04 64-bit from www.mythbuntu.org.  My goal was to see if I could saturate the 8Mbps down that Comcast was generous enough to rent me.  My average is the same I get on the other computers which is around 770KBps.

Watch DVD Rips from the Fileserver

Another test.  If I can’t open up videos from the fileserver, it would be a waste of $40.  So, opening up some Matroska files I had created awhile back, I had no problems watching videos (1Mbps) from the server.

Watch HD Rips from the Fileserver

Again, no problems either.  These are a bit bigger and encoded at a higher bitrate so if it was going to choke, this would be a good place to try it out.  The average HD encode that I have peaks around 5Mbps.

Move The 543MB ISO from the HTPC to the Fileserver

Okay, now for the only speed test that I tried.  I don’t have any true bandwidth testing utilities installed, but the whole purpose of this purchase was to get videos from the fileserver to play on the HTPC.  That came through with flying colors.  Now, to see how long this transfer would take.

The max bandwidth (UDP) is stated at around 190Mbps.  This could mean that I could see something around 19MBps in transfer speeds if everything was aligned right including the stars.

543MB took 7 minues.  Now, don’t let this figure fool you.  The file was transfered onto a SMB share hosted on the fileserver.  I have never come close to having the transfer speed match up to the network speeds due to massive overhead so this a completely BS test.  I’ll try to post some iperf numbers later for an actual speed.

Conclusion

This was well worth $40.  Hell, it would be well worth the $90 that NewEgg has this product at.  I can’t say that there is anything bad about this product at the moment because of the $40 price tag.  If you can get it while it’s on sale at Amazon, and it fits your needs then go for it.

Add in the option to buy more “terminal” units and add them to the “master” unit, you could literally create a HD-PLC LAN in the wires of your house.

Update

I have finished up the bandwidth tests using iperf and have some hard figures for people:

From my File Server (Gentoo/2.6.22-gentoo-r8) to my HTPC (Ubuntu/2.6.24-16-generic) through the HD-PLC:

------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  4] local 10.0.0.103 port 5001 connected with 10.0.0.80
[  4]  0.0-20.1 sec  31.6 MBytes  13.2 Mbits/sec

From my Mac Pro (10.5.3) to my HTPC through the HD-PLC:

------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  5] local 10.0.0.103 port 5001 connected with 10.0.0.100
[  5]  0.0-20.1 sec  30.6 MBytes  12.8 Mbits/sec

From my Mac Pro to the Gentoo File Server:

------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  4] local 10.0.0.80 port 5001 connected with 10.0.0.100
[  4]  0.0-20.0 sec  1.65 GBytes    710 Mbits/sec