Can't Connect Across Circuits?

[dshlapak]

Newbie here, so please be gentle...

Bought two D-Line 500Mbps PowerLine adapters to use in my 3,000 sq ft 19th century Victorian row house. Plugged one into the wall, then into the router in my office, the other into the wall in the room where I wanted to test performance. Configured per instructions, all the LEDs on both glowing a nice steady green. Verified that the router was sending good IP data to the "home" adapter. Nothing but bogus IP addresses coming out of the remote box, however. More specifically, there are no IP addresses coming out, so the laptop eventually gives itself one.

Called D-Link tech support, who report that the devices won't work if they aren't plugged into the same circuit. Right. I've got 15+ circuits in my house; even my 1990s-era town home back in Virginia had six or eight. What are the odds that two arbitrary rooms will be on the same one? Not good, in my experience.

Is this problem peculiar to these D-Link boxes, or is it universal? If the latter, it would seem to really limit the utility of the technology. What am I missing?

UPDATE: Tried plugging the "remote" adapter into outlets in the same room and an adjacent room, with the same unsatisfactory results. Still can't get an IP address. Which may suggest that I'm doing something screwy...or that my house is wired even more crazily than I thought. Suggestions?

 

[thiggins]

D-Link support is wrong. Current design powerline gear will work across different breaker circuits and even across split phase 220V. It won't work across distribution transformers and some AFCI breakers can significantly affect performance. Check this article for other troubleshooting info.

Could be that your adapters somehow got set to different security codes. Start by resetting both adapters to defaults following the instructions in the user manual.

Then start by plugging both adapters into the same outlet or outlets in the same room to make sure they can connect. Then move the adapters apart.

 

[dshlapak]

Thank you, thank you, thank you! Once I got the reset procedure straight (the quick start that comes with the adapters says nothing, and the downloadable manual lies; the real process, as I learned with a second call to tech support, is, like, six steps), they worked! Without your advice, I'd have unnecessarily given up on a technology that solves a big honkin' problem for me. I'm getting up to 20x faster throughput in parts of my house now; FiOS finally feels really different from DSL.

It's hard to fathom D-Link telling its customers that one of its products is, basically, junk, but there you go.

A million thanks for your help. Truly saved the day.

 

[thiggins]

You're welcome. Glad you got it sorted out.