Good day, I have a faulty TP Link internet powerline adapter. Boasts 500 Mbps. I think I will replace it with a 15 M ethernet cable. Or a 600 Mbps powerline adapter.

Are there any 1100 Mbps devices? Is 600 Mbps the best?

How fast is a simple ethernet cable connected to the Cable modem?

Hi there,

whenever possible, I'd go for a direct cable connection. Any sophisticated device in between (powerline, WiFi) is a potential source of trouble and is likely to reduce the overall speed.

The fastest I've seen so far were advertised as 500Mbps. But don't let the marketing guys fool you: This is just the theoretical maximum rate under ideal conditions. That is, a speed you might be able to achieve in a lab environment, over a distance of maybe 5m and on a power distribution network where no other devices are hooked up. Any other appliance impairs the transmission, each meter of cable length reduces the level on the receiving side and thus forces the PLC modems to use a lower gear.

I'm using a pair of 200Mbps PLC modems from one room to another, but the actual speed I'm experiencing is usually below 50Mbps.

As fast as the cable modem can do. I don't know what speed your internet connection offers, but usually it's a lot lower than a domestic LAN running 100 or even 1000Mbps. And obviously, the cable modem can't transfer any faster than it sends or receives data on the WAN side.

[X] Doc CPU

As fast as the modems Ethernet port is rated, so that could be 100Mb or 1Gb depending on the modem. If it's a 1Gb port then you'll need CAT5e or CAT6 cabling to take full advantage.

You'd have to have a screaming system to support much more than 500 I'd think. Almost impossible for a common system to truly support gig speeds for any amount of time.

You could test what you have with a simple store bought cable from room to room and see if you really can get the speeds you think it should deliver. Again, you could get bad cable from store.

I've used powerline for quite a long time. Took me a while to discover reasons why it might fail also. Various line features like overload or lightning arrestor, UPS, and unique wiring or arc fault/ground fault could cause issues. Even power companies that have ip over power to read meters could cause you some issues.

Note that if you intend to use it with your existing adaptor, it has to be compatible with the existing adaptor. I'm not sure whether this is still the case, but there used to be two competing standards, and they were not mutually compatible. Even when they had speed bumps, they were only compatible with devices of the same general series.

And, while there was some backward compatibility, that was only within one of the two standards and, obviously, that was by falling back to the speed of the lower speed device (the lower speed device couldn't work any faster than its fastest speed, but the faster one could fall back to a slower speed).

Power lines are generally noisy (they have lots of equipment connected to them which aren't really designed to minimise noise, beyond a relatively coarse level) and the signal has to get through this noise. Sometimes it can do this easily and some times it can't, and in those times there have to be re-tries, which influences the data rates.

As far as I know, powerline is half-duplex (although you may see some buffering which makes this less visible), and for some use cases this doesn't influence the observed speed much, and in others it does.

And, for the most part, when people usually quote networking speeds (eg, ethernet), those usually aren't really speeds as commonly understood, but signalling rates, so observed speeds are lower.

If you are only using this to access the internet directly, then the maximimum speed that you'll get is the speed of the bottleneck (the slowest speed in the system). OTOH, if you also access say, a fileserver, a print server, etc, there might be a case that you can get some utility from a faster speed than that of your internet connection.

I have bought different brands and never configured them. They just plug in and work. Not sure what the exact standard that makes them work but it is searchable.