Back in 2017, I invested in a series of Powerline adaptors, which allowed us to use our household wiring as an Ethernet network. At the time, we were having issues with Wi-Fi speeds and coverage, and so having a wired connection seemed like a good idea. Because wired connections are usually more reliable – right?
Well, it appears not. Or at least, newer Wi-Fi devices seem to be faster and more reliable, to the extent that I have dismantled our Powerline network. In November, we upgraded to a Fritz!Box router and repeater which both offer Wi-Fi 6. When I’ve tested our speeds on both Powerline and Wi-Fi, Powerline seems to max out at 80 Mbps, which is less than our incoming broadband speed of 105 Mbps. Meanwhile, I’ve also had some issues with flaky connections when watching streaming video on our TV over Powerline, which went away when I unplugged it and used Wi-Fi instead.
As someone who has been using networking equipment since the turn of the century, to have Wi-Fi outperform a cabled connection just seems wrong. But the performance just is better all round. And, as a bonus, not having Powerline frees up several plug sockets to use for other things, and uses very slightly less power.
In any case, there is only one device that we own which doesn’t support Wi-Fi, and that’s our Home Assistant Green. For that, I’m just using one of the Ethernet ports on the back of our repeater. Everything else that we own which has an Ethernet socket, also supports Wi-Fi. At some point, I’ll get around to tidying away all of the now redundant cables.
