Homeplug and Moca are too Mysterious

[corndog]

I've been playing around with various powerline, phone-line, and Coax networking for years. But I always give up in frustration eventually. My main concern always comes down to a basic lack of useful information about what is happening on my network. With my ethernet network, I can use a half-decent managed switch (and they're not even that expensive any more) to collect a pile of performance information about the behaviour of the network. I can monitor traffic patters with mrtg and - heck, even basic things like being able to ping the switch to see if it is alive using nagios really helps.

But with the alternative networking technologies, there is an appalling absense of any such info. Where can I find a basic managed homeplug switch? I'd be happy enough to even be able to ping the thing! Even better - snmp monitoring and management. Next step - vlan management. If I have 8 homeplug adapters in my network, why can't I use a couple vlans to manage the traffic between them instead of having them all on one big "just trust us. you don't need to see what's happening in there" network?

We read other threads on this forum about people's homeplug devices losing their config and then inadvertantly dropping them onto a neighbor's network. Wow! And the solution is to press a few buttons and watch for flashing lights and "just trust us. It's now secure. Thumbs up. Carry on."?

Please.

I want to know (for example) that my network is potentially exposed to two different neighbor networks, and that they are not interfering too badly because their SNR is quite a bit lower than my own network - I should be able to find all of this out by using readily available software to monitor my network. I can do all of this kind of thing with WiFi and with ethernet. Why not with Powerline?

Very frustrating. It shouldn't be such a mystery.

 

[stevech]

With both, you can elect to encrypt the packets.
With MoCA, if you have a cable TV amplifier between your house and the outside world, the (encrypted or not) RF signal won't leave the home.

With HomePlug/HPNA, since 2+ homes may have their AC mains drop joined in common at the mains transformer, there is a slight chance that your RF could go to a neighbor's home. But really, if it's encrypted packets, and if the signal is strong enough (unlikely), and if the neighbor has both the skills AND motivation, it is possible.

But most unlikely.

 

[corndog]

Yes,

All valid and accurate points, but that doesn't change anything. I don't want to have to blindly trust anything because of some design principles. I want to KNOW, because of clearly exposed data from my own testing. In my home right here, I want to KNOW how many neighbor networks are visible. I want to know that my encryption settings will protect me from them (to the best of my ability anyway).

I want to know the moment another network shows up, or if one goes away. I want to know if there any powerline networks in place from my municipal services providers, monitoring my water meter or power meter or whatever.

All of this, and more, I can do with WiFi. I'm not interested in breaking into my neighbor's networks. But I know how many there are, and what channels they're on. And if I start to have problems, I can factor that knowledge into my efforts to address things (moving to different channels, whatever)

The obscurity of powerline, in my opinion, is one of it's biggest weaknesses.

 

[thiggins]

I agree that there should be better tools for managing and troubleshooting HomePlug networks. But, as with WiFi, they are more likely to come from third parties and open-source efforts than from manufacturers.

The problem here may be due to the single-source nature of the chipsets. Powerline has basically been single sourced from Intellon, which was bought by Qualcomm, since the beginning. The Intellon / DS2 battle held back the technology for too long with a futile battle, which was eventually won by HomePlug and the emergence of IEEE 1901. Broadcom is just getting into the battle, so perhaps competition will bring improvements in this area.

Another thing to keep in mind is relative product volume. Powerline has nowhere near the volume of Wi-Fi, so smaller development $ are invested.

You're not going to find a powerline switch any more than you can find a Wi-Fi switch. Both technologies use shared spectrum, not switched wired media. VLANs are already supported, as is QoS priority tagging. Both require utilities to set and not all manufacturers ship utilities with adapters.

 

[azazel1024]

The only other useful things I have to add to what Thiggins and Steve mentioned are...

1) To add on, there are management utilities most powerline adapters have, and most seem to interoperate (because, most have the same chipset manufacturer) even if your specific manufacturer doesn't have one

2) The market. Homeplug and MoCA really, really are not targeted at a "professional" market of businesses and enterprise. They run ethernet or fiber if they need a network, they don't use their coax or electrical wiring (or they go wireless)

3) To emphasis 2, but in a different way, the market is tiny compared to ethernet and wifi, with the SOLE exception of MoCA, which might approach the wifi market by having a large percentage (at least in to the high single digit percentages) of the same market as Wifi. However, it is almost ALL in ISP router/bridge boxes (Actiontec mostly) for things like FIOS and other FTTH providers. In which case, there is some amount of MoCA management information available.

4) There ARE management utilities, management pages and that sort of thing for SOME of the devices in question. Some MoCA bridges have an actual management page. A few are true "dumb" bridges, but most have some kind of management page or a management utility you can use to access some configuration settings and information about them. Same thing with powerline (except most have a management utility).

 

[corndog]

You're not going to find a powerline switch any more than you can find a Wi-Fi switch. VLANs are already supported, as is QoS priority tagging. Both require utilities to set and not all manufacturers ship utilities with adapters.

Hi Tim, for "Powerline switch" I'm referring to things like the little Dlink DHP-541 I have here - four ethernet ports and powerline. Also, Actiontech has the PWR514. I'm hoping I can get one of those with web management access. A WiFi Access Point is pretty much a "WiFi Switch" by the same definition.

When you say "VLANs are already supported" I assume you mean "VLANs are blindly passed through, unchanged, to the other side of the powerline link". Kinda hoping for a little more than that.

Azazel: Understood about "not really targeted at a professional market of businesses and enterprise" But neither are the ASUS WiFi Routers, and they have a colossal PILE of information available about the network - no reason why that can't be done also on PowerLine. The utilities that comes with them are at best useless, and at worst full of lies.

Most of those utilities that I have used quote a "link rate" between the different powerline devices. But you never actually hit that link rate with real-world traffic you actually send over the power line.

In comparison, my home-not-professional-targeted ASUS WiFi router gives me nice dynamically updating graphs showing actual throughput on the WiFi link that I can verify by watching the data transfer on my computer - not some hypothetical lie about link rate that I never achieve in real life.

I don't like my technology treating me like I'm an idiot

 

[thiggins]

Hi Tim, for "Powerline switch" I'm referring to things like the little Dlink DHP-541 I have here - four ethernet ports and powerline. Also, Actiontech has the PWR514. I'm hoping I can get one of those with web management access. A WiFi Access Point is pretty much a "WiFi Switch" by the same definition.

I'm sure combo switch / adapters in these higher powerline classes will appear eventually. Unlikely that the switches will be managed, though. Not enough general interest to sell enough of 'em at the higher price they would require.

When you say "VLANs are already supported" I assume you mean "VLANs are blindly passed through, unchanged, to the other side of the powerline link". Kinda hoping for a little more than that.

No, I mean some utilities let you assign VLAN tags.

 

[azazel1024]

Wifi has a much greater deployment and the market can bear the price though to have those features. Powerline and MoCA cannot. Its unfortunately as simple as that.

If/when more competition exists in either market, it is at least possible/probable that companies/chipset manufacturers will attempt to diversify a bit by adding such features, but as it stands now, they don't have any real need to, so they aren't going to waste the resources.

Wifi and ethernet have both the market and the competition necessary to need to do things like differentiate on features, so that kind of stuff is available.

Powerline and MoCA are effectively in the Model T-Ford stage of things, not the current automobile market, which is where wifi and ethernet effectively are.

PS Unless I am missing something, the Asus isn't providing you real time wifi or switch traffic data (unless maybe alt firmware) and it is only telling you WAN traffic. Yes, the powerline/MoCA adapters could tell you that, but the need for that is a tiny subslice of a subslice of the market that the bridges/adapters are targeted at. They also aren't ROUTERs, which have a much greater need for any kind of router to show you information like WAN traffic...which is also missing from most routers and only a relative handful actually tell you things like WAN traffic. Wifi link rates are also things of fiction, but they can tell you a bit of info. It tells you the current modulation rate, which can give you an indication of just how good/bad the signal strength is, though you also have to account for interference to determine ultimate throughput.

The fictitious numbers aren't necessarily, just like Wifi, there is overhead, retransmits, etc. 600Mbps just means that the modulation rate supports 600 million bits per second. Of that 600 million, some is taken up by packet headers, some by error correction parity bits and sometimes part of a packet is lost (or an entire packet is lost) and the transmission has to be halted and retransmitted taking up some of the talk time. The "AV600" adapters are truely 600Mbps, its just that a lot of that 600Mbps even in a perfect clean, pristine state is NOT payload data, it is overhead. Then combine with electrical wiring being a horridly noise environment, and 600Mbps becomes a fantasy. It isn't necessarily a lie or real fiction, its just that most situations you won't get close to it, just like wifi. No real way to lable a product with what kind of actual performance you'll get, because what you can expect varies completely on the deployment environment and there isn't really anything like a "typical" setup, ESPECIALLY with powerline.

 

[stevech]

In WiFi and in power line, it comes down to bad-guy motive (rare) and your choice of encryption key.

 

[corndog]

Hmmmm...

Maybe a possibility here:

http://www.asokatech.com/pluglan-page - I'm going to have to give it a try.

 

[corndog]

What do you guys consider to be the best management software out there, for Qualcomm/Atheros/Intellon-based Powerline products?

Over the years I've tried stuff from Netgear, Dlink, Linksys, Logitech, and Actiontec (maybe I've forgotten some others also)

Currently I have Actiontec PWR500 devices running - interesting that they call them 500megabit, but the ethernet port is only 100megabit. GRRR.. Anyways, I'm getting 94megabit on my current active link, which is nice. But they don't come with any sort of management utility at all, and there doesn't seem to be one offered on their site either.