Unfortunately I believe a software fix (ie firmware update) is required and so far nothing has been forthcoming from TP-Link. I’m sure a few Wireshark captures would confirm this in more detail but as I’m relying on TP-Link to fix it one way or another I haven’t drilled down to that level. Without much visibility under the hood (this can’t run the highly customisable DD-WRT as that doesn’t understand powerline networking) the best I can tell is that some types of traffic are not being bridged onto the wireless AP correctly. When the wireless fails I can’t even ping the TP-Link’s IP address wirelessly, even though i can ping my router and other devices on my network, and I can ping the TP-Link via a wired connection. For my Chromecast I’ve therefore set my DHCP server to reserve an IP for about a year! To alleviate the issue even further I’ve now bought a mains timer switch and automatically reboot the unit twice a day – a horrible hack, but it works.
Interestingly setting a static IP seems to be a good partial workaround as the wireless AP is still working and sending most types of traffic, but some devices, like the Chromecast, only support DHCP. A simple reboot of the TP-Link resolves the issue for a while but it recurs within a few hours. I quickly identified that DHCP broadcasts weren’t being received by wireless clients so devices were failing to renew their leases and dropping off the network. The problem seems to be certain types of traffic don’t pass through the wireless AP, even through plugging into the wired powerline socket on the same unit works fine. Sadly the logs for these units are hardly worth having as you can see in the screenshot below – over 20 hours after powering it on (and with Wifi failing) all that was logged was the initial startup event and even that didn’t have a timestamp After further investigation and some Googling I found plenty of people in a similar scenario ( here, here, here, and here) but with no acknowledgement or fix forthcoming from TP-Link. I’ve got a mixture of tablets (a couple of iPads, Nexus 7), smartphones, Sonos wireless speakers and the odd Google Chromecast and found that within a day or so they’d lose internet access. Still, I can stream HD without issue most of the time.Īll said I was very happy with my powerline setup, until I’d been running the integrated wireless AP for a few days and started noticing connectivity problems. I think TP-Link may be reporting ‘theoretical’ speeds achievable over my powerlines (using the PHY layer) whereas ‘real world’ transmission is impacted by many other factors. Even allowing for protocol overheads there’s a significant discrepancy. For example TP-Link reports 75Mbps when iPerf reports 25Mbps for the same link.
TP LINK POWERLINE UTILITY MANUAL UPDATE
UPDATE APRIL 2015 – I’ve now done some testing with iPerf and my speeds are lower than those reported by the TP-Link utility – often significantly. Speed is affected (my dropped to 60Mbps when crossing phases) but I’m really just using it for web browsing and streaming some video which seems to work fine. At first I thought this would prevent or greatly hinder my use of powerline networking but my powerline networking works just fine over multiple power phases (apparently a shared consumer unit is key). The bigger variable in my case was the fact I have a three phase power supply, rather than the more usual one. Plugging them in and getting them working took all of five minutes and voila – connectivity! The speeds weren’t great (around 80M bps on average, so 5-6M Bps on file transfers) but then my house was built in the 70s so it’s not especially modern and that does affect speeds. My local computer store had a couple of TP-Link units in stock ( WPA4220 Starter Kit) and I bought them on a whim. I’d used an early set of these (85Mbps) back in 2007 but standards have definitely advanced in this area and now we have 500Mbps adapters ( well sort of) so I thought it was worth revisiting the technology. I’ve recently moved house and didn’t want to go to the time and expense of wiring up my new house with CAT6 ethernet, so opted for some Powerline adapters instead.
Summary: Powerline adaptors are better than they used to be but they aren’t without their problems.
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