Paul’s Tech Makeover: Powerline Networking (Premium)

While I still plan to wire Ethernet into my home office, I’m experimenting with Powerline networking in the furthest reaches of the house. And while it’s still early, I think this may solve a problem that, granted, is a bit unique to my situation.

To understand that situation, let’s go back to the beginning: Three years ago, we bought a family home in Pennsylvania. Months before we moved, I arranged for RCN Internet—basically, our only viable choice in this area—and installed a three-node Google Wifi mesh networking solution. So that was waiting for us when we finally did move, in August.

I chose mesh networking because this house is large, about half again as big as the house we left in Massachusetts, and wiring it for Ethernet would be a daunting and expensive task. (Related, I wasn’t sure which rooms my wife would use for our home offices at first either.) And I chose Google Wifi because it was so simple to set up and use.

For the most part, the Internet situation has been solid. The 330 Mbps down/30 Mbps up advertised speed of my RCN connection is a far cry from the 800/800 I was getting from FIOS in Boston (and the 1 Gbps/1 Gbps I’d be getting now), and it goes up and down at times, performance-wise, but it’s been fine. Google Wifi has been spectacular.

When we moved into the house, we needed to put the RCN router in a corner of the first floor, but this wasn’t ideal, so I had the company come in and rewire it so that it could be placed behind the TV in the living room, which is almost dead-center in the house (which is a basic rectangle aside from the sunroom, which juts off the back). Then, I placed the three Google Wifi nodes in a vertical line, with one each on the top floor (in a bedroom that my wife uses for her office), in the living room behind the TV, and in the finished part of the basement.

At the time, this layout seemed to make sense, and we had a solid Wi-Fi signal pretty much everywhere in the house. The only possible exception was the far corner of the sunroom, which is about as far as you can get from any of the Google Wifi nodes, and the back patio, which is right off of the sunroom. But the Internet worked in those locations too, so whatever.

When the pandemic first triggered the work-from-home situation we’re still dealing with now, I started repeatedly experiencing poor Internet connectivity. I had been planning to install Ethernet into this room at some point, which could/should be relatively easy because the main Google Wifi node is right behind a wall that borders the office and living room and is over the unfinished part of the basement. (Part of what held this up was my company’s requirement that I make the office more appealing for podcasts, so I wasted some time reorganizing the layout and backdrop that viewers see.) But trying times call for action, so I just laid wire on the floor and connected a switch in my office to a switch in the living room that is connected to the Google Wifi node via Ethernet. It’s not pretty but it works, and I’ve not had any connectivity issues in there since.

Where I have had connectivity issues is with my Sonos smart speaker system. As I wrote back in February, I finally decided to go all-in on Sonos so that we could have a single whole-house audio system that just worked. And it does just work, to a point. The issue is that Sonos doesn’t play well with mesh wireless networking solutions like Google Wifi; Sonos prefers to own one of your router’s Wi-Fi channels, and mesh networking is specifically designed to automatically move devices between the available channels so that they always have the best connection. The result was that one of my Sonos Play:5 speakers in the sunroom—which, again, is also the furthest point in the house from any router—would sometimes cut out while we were listening to music. It was maddening.

So I Googled it. The official Sonos position is that you will always have perfect connectivity if you just use Ethernet networking. But I wasn’t super-interested in that because of the distances involved and the difficulty of the install: Unlike the rest of the house, there’s no basement underneath the sunroom; instead, there’s just a small crawlspace, and the cabling would need to go to the far end of it.

But Sonos also explains that if you simply wired one Sonos speaker via Ethernet, it will create its own Sonosnet network that the other speakers will also use. This is supposed to clear up any playback issues caused by wireless interference. So I tested it by de-pairing one of the Sonos-based IKEA Symfonisk Wi-Fi bookshelf speakers that we use in the kitchen and installing it in the living room, attached by Ethernet to the router.

And … it worked. I never had any playback issues with the Play:5s in the sunroom again. The problem was, I didn’t want to keep a speaker in the living room, so I considered just buying one that would sit in there literally to make music playbook work. I’m not a fan of throwing money at problems, so this didn’t sit well with me. But then we ended up getting a Sonos Beam soundbar for the TV. Which is in the living room. And could be wired via Ethernet to the router.

So I did that. And it seemed to work fine. I bet we had about two months of uninterrupted music in the sunroom, so I stopped thinking about it. I’m not sure how your mind works, but I’m kind of a set it and forget it guy. I stop thinking or worrying about things once they’re up and running correctly.

But last weekend, we went into the sunroom to listen to music and only one of the Play:5s was working. I futzed around with it for a while, de-pairing them (in which case both worked) and then re-pairing them (in which case one would not work), and finally gave up. I asked my son Mark if he would be interested in helping me get Ethernet into the sunroom so we could stop this stupidity.

He agreed, but then something occurred to me. What about powerline networking? This form of home networking sits somewhere between Ethernet and Wi-Fi performance-wise, and that performance can vary mightily depending on what your home wiring is like and how far apart the nodes are. But that’s one area in which my house is ideal for this type of thing: We spent an embarrassing amount of money in late 2017 upgrading the entire electrical system in this house, so it’s all modern, new, and correctly wired. Maybe powerline networking could work in the sunroom, where I could add a node with two Ethernet jacks and wire both Sonos speakers.

After a bit of research, I decided to purchase the TP-Link AV2000 Powerline Adapter from Amazon. This set comes with two powerline adapters, one to be placed by the router and one in the sunroom. It provides a theoretical 2 Gbps connection via the two Ethernet ports on each adapter and has a passthrough power port connector so you don’t lose a port on the wall. (Actually, you will still lose a port because the adapters are pretty big, but you could get around this with a short extension power cable.)

What this set doesn’t provide is Wi-Fi: Some powerline adapters also come with this capability, which probably makes sense in many homes. But because we’re using mesh networking, that would just get in the way and cause more interference; I have often considered adding a Google Wifi node in the sunroom and may still do so, but this is specifically for Sonos.

Setup couldn’t have been easier, though I had to swap some switches around because the one in my office had too many ports and the one I had in the living room originally had too few. But basically, I just unplugged the power strip in the living room, plugged one TP-Link adapter in the wall, and then plugged the power strip back into that. In the sunroom, I unplugged on Play:5 speaker, plugged in the other TP-Link adapter, and then re-plugged the speaker into that. To connect the two adapters, you just need to press a Pair button on each.

Then, I tested the connectivity. Today, in my home office using Ethernet, I’m getting 100 percent of RCN’s promised bandwidth and then some: My test showed a healthy 344.8 Mbps down and 24.8 Mbps up. Nice.

Then, I used a laptop to test the connectivity over Wi-Fi and the powerline system. In the living room using Wi-Fi, I saw 60.4 down/24.5 up. In the far corner of the sunroom, that dropped to 26 down/23 up, which, again, is perfectly fine. (Remember, this is more about eliminating wireless interference for Sonos.) Then, I connected the laptop to an Ethernet dongle. The speeds were nearly identical: 61.2 down and 24.6 up.

So the next step was to connect a Sonos Play:5 to the powerline adapter via Ethernet and disable Wi-Fi access on that speaker. This is done via the Sonos mobile app, but it’s simple enough when you know where to look. And I’ve done this enough that I can navigate right to it. (I may later connect the other Play:5 to the adapter, but I’m not sure this is strictly necessary.)

Anyway, it worked on the first try. And when I cast music from Google Play Music to the Sonos speakers in the sunroom, it belted out in sumptuous stereo.

But of course it did. This thing was already mostly working, and it was only last weekend that we experienced any glitches. So we’ll need to test this over time. My expectation is that it will work fine. But it will be a few weeks, maybe a few months, before I can stop thinking or worrying about this. Fingers crossed.