If you’ve actually cut the cord, and have lots of coaxial cable running through your house that is not being used, then these adapters are a very cheap way to hard wire the Tablo without running Ethernet cables.
They work great - it’s a very stable and fast way to hard wire your Tablo to your router if the router and Tablo are not in the same room. More reliable that WiFi.
Powerline is aweful for video streaming. I’d never recommend it for applications that require any sort of ongoing bandwidth. I prefer MOCA adapters over DECA, but both are amazing devices, but be aware that you may have installation issues to consider. Depending on your coax configuration, you may need to add a MOCA/DECA termination filter at your cable box, otherwise your network is basically wide open to your neighbors. Once you get everything configured, though, they’re solid little network devices. I have 5 in my home, to expand my wired backbone around the house.
This is the first negative comment I’ve seen on this forum about using powerline adapters. I’ve generally only seen positive comments and that’s the reason I decided to use it for my Tablo setup. Not to say that I’ve had a flawless experience, I’m still working out buffering issues, so I can’t say by my own experience that it’s been good, but I don’t know how much is related to the powerline adapters. Can you elaborate more on the reason you think it’s not a good idea?
Powerline adapters are heavily influenced by wire quality and signal on your electrical lines, and some larger homes have multiple circuits, which power line adapters can’t cross. My home, for instance, is split on 2 separate circuits at the breaker box, which means adapters in certain parts of the house (mostly downstairs) can’t connect with adapters elsewhere on the other circuit. On top of that, connectivity is heavily influenced by other devices that may put noise in the power lines. In my case, space heaters during the winter draw enough current that my power line adapters completely lose connection. I’ve tested throughput using my power line devices and the speeds fluctuate greatly during a 500 MB download test. The power lines at my mother’s place are 1970 era wiring and power line won’t even connect on them.
Bottom line is that I’ve never seen power line adapters get their rated throughput, and they’re sketchy. MOCA/DECA adapters, however, are super-solid and I’ve tested at over 100 Mbps throughput.
I’m sure that in some houses with some electrical lines, they work well enough. I’ve just had a very bad experience with them, and coax cable is far more stable.
I know they’re an older standard (200), so I suppose that could be a source of trouble. The house is only 10 years old, and only one level @1600 sq. ft. I’m not aware of any splits in the main circuits, nor would I expect any in this size of house. The heating/cooling is central forced heat pump so I don’t use any auxiliary heating or cooling devices. I think that my situation is pretty simple with nothing out of the ordinary.
Yep. I’m in a three floor 5,000 sq foot place, with 2 split circuits. The rooms the kids are in are on the 2nd floor and even though we have central air/heating, since their rooms are exterior corners, they get a bit cold when we hit sub-zero in Jan. It’s probably just the size of my place and the length of the electrical circuits causing me issues.
Can you link together a few of these DECA adapters? Right now I have around 5 Power line adapters all connected.
Edit: I assume you can, or these things are near worthless. I just bought 2 to try them out. After spending over $100 on Powerline adapters, and not experiencing perfect results, I’m ready to try something different.
Yes you can. You need on of these DECA adapters to insert Internet into the coax network and another at each location to access that network.
I’ve seen switches hooked up to these adapters to provide wired Ethernet to every device in an entertainment center. It’s easy to set up, and rarely will you have any issues at all.
As I’ve said on other links, I use 3 DECA adaptors (approx. $21) and am hard wired throughout the house (using some switches). They worked with no problem. Jsut another alternative for people to consider. Powerline adaptors could not be used in my house because of multiple electric circuits
DECA is MoCA over a lower frequency range. MoCA from a cable company would interfere with DirecTV video signal, DECA would interfere with cable video signal.
I use the powerline adaptors and they are great (we dont have any coax run in our house since the installers were lazy and the prior owners of our house thought it was a good idea to run the cable outside!!)
Oh, and as a side note, these DECA adapters will go away, or at least be harder to come by in the not-so-distant future.
DECA is now built into all current DirecTV DVR’s and receivers. All of the devices that required an external DECA have been EOL’d and and DirecTV isn’t even recapturing failed units.
The HR24 has been EOL’d, but they are still collecting defective units. The HR24 has an internal DECA.
I have about a dozen of these DECA adapters, just because.
So I realized I might be out of luck with these adapters. I have a coax Jack in every room, except the kitchen, where my modem/router is located. The modem can’t go anywhere else because apparently only phone jack which is live for Centurylink internet service is in my kitchen. For it to work for me, I would need a coax Jack next to my phone jack, correct? I’m really disappointed because the Powerline adapters are very average, they really slow down when a lot of other devices are sucking down electricity in the same room.
Yes, to use the adapters, you’d need coax next to the router, so you can get the router’s signal into the coax lines. If you really want to look into it, you could probably change the location of the router. The only “live” phone line may be in the kitchen because that’s the only phone line currently wired in. If you have phone jacks other places in the house, you can probably get them hooked into the same connection the incoming DSL line is on, unless they wired a single shot straight from the outside of the house to your kitchen wall, in which case you’re out of luck.
Sadly, to get the nice reliable setup I have now, I’ve had to rewire my house, both phone and coax, a couple of times. Commercial builders never think about intelligent wiring plans ahead of time.
I’ve had almost every generation of powerline ethernet kit, from all the way back back to the 14mbs originals up to the 600mbs kits I am using now. One constant is that they have always delivered only a fraction of their advertised speed…even under the best of real-world conditions. I can remember my 200mbs kit was delivering only ~5mb of real throughput in one particular use-case. It was a constant source of frustration. The technology really came into its own, however, starting with the “AV2” standard compliant kits which have shown up over the last few years. Much better reliability and throughput.
One key thing I have learned over the years with powerline adapters: Get the kits with the power outlet-passthrough. One thing that is not well known/advertised is that the kits with the passthrough outlets have noise-filtering capabilities. Noise on the powerlines reduces throughput of powerline adapters…especially when that noise is originating at a powerline endpoint (like your TV/Roku/etc). Plugging those electronics into the noise-filtered outlet of your powerline adapter will increase your real throughput by lowering the noise floor on your powerlines.
Another big one for me was filtering my UPS. For reasons that aren’t completely clear to me…having a UPS plugged into the same circuit as powerline adapters will absolutely crush throughput. Simply plugging my UPS into the filtered outlet caused my throughput to increase from ~60mbps to 130mbps while using 500mbps class adapters.
