Powerline Networking: The Prodigal Son Returns

Back in mid-October, I wrote that I'd given up trying to establish a powerline link between the access points in my office and the AC closet (specifically see Figure 1), and had instead wirelessly linked them via 'bridge' mode (with the one in the AC closet acting as the repeater). At the time, I indicated that I knew there'd be a performance 'hit' to this approach, but that I'd take a slowdown over an erratic connection any day. And in its defense, the repeater setup has been rock-solid. Until recently, however, I didn't realize how much of a speed degradation I was incurring.

Sunday evening while my wife and I were reclining on our bed, I attempted to show her the 150+ picture archive of last week's pre-CES trip to Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks, which was stored on my Infrant ReadyNAS in the office. XP's Windows Explorer, however, locked up and eventually reported an access error whenever I tried to access the relevent directory. More generally, any directory with more than a few dozen files produced the same behaviour. At the time, my laptop was connected to the AC closet access point. When I moved the laptop in range of an access point that was CAT5-connected to the router (and CAT5 from there to the ReadyNAS, of course) the problem disapppeared.

So I've re-connected the AC closet's access point to the rest of the LAN via powerline. DS2 had earlier provided me with an AC noise filter (see, for example, Radio Shack part number 15-1111) which I'm using to screen out the noise that the heater/swamp cooler fan is likely injecting into my home's power grid. Everything's working fine right now, but I'll keep my fingers crossed; currently I'm not in the summer timeframe when powerline network problems are most acute. And I've suggested to Infrant that they see what they can do about improving their NAS's tolerance of long-latency and packet-dropping networks; my Buffalo TeraStation NAS didn't exhibit similar behaviour when accessed over the wireless bridge, so I can't completely point the blame finger at Wi-Fi.