this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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Electricity is already wired throughout, you just need to get to the closest plug. You have to run ethernet the whole length and it has length limitations. It's not trivial.
I mean ethernet has a range of 100 meters in one run (including with POE), which is probably going to be longer than the WiFi range assuming the WiFi access point is at the switch and it's a relatively straight run. If you need more range a small 4 port POE switch is hardly likely to break the bank if you have a property big enough to need over 100 meters of ethernet in one run.
Isn't there ethernet over power or something like that?
There is indeed ethernet over power and I have been using it for almost 2 decades to connect a desktop PC in a room to the router in a different room in the various places I lived in over the years.
It used to be only 20Mb/s way back in the beginning but nowadays (last I checked) 500Mb/s was common.
I keep expecting this stuff to just come integrated in devices that are supposed to be wired to mains and also need network access to move around lots of data but I have yet to found such option built-in on auch devices: ethernet over power support usually comes in as a just a wall socket plug that also has an ethernet socket.
That said, it works better if all plugs are on the same mains network with now breaker boxes in between since the high frequency signals needed to transport data at high speeds don't travel through inductors that well. I'm not quite sure how big houses in the US are wired, but this might be a problem if the device is trying to send lots if data across and the device and the router are in different mains subnetworks.
If you’re in an apartment, is this like putting everything on the same switch? Could you snoop your neighbors traffic? How is that secured?
Those things need to be paired to be able to see each other's data stream so I assume it's encrypted.
Also there are almost certainly TWO big breaker boxes (one for each appartment) plus meters - all of which with coils, which filter out high frequency signals - between your network and your neighbours', so your bandwidth is not going to be suffering from neighbours that are using a similar system, unlike with anything radio-based like Wi-Fi.
I actually suspect this is even better suited for appartments than for standalone dwellings when your objective is bandwidth, because the signal will basically stop at the breaker box so you don't really interfere with each other whilst with Wi-Fi what stops interference is distance (and big thick walls or large metal surfaces) so appartment buildings are pretty nightmarish for it because everybody is so near everybody else.
My own personal experience with this is all in appartment buildings and I actually first tried it back in the day when everybody and their dog started getting Wi-Fi and routers had become smart enough to automatically search for a less constrained Wi-Fi channel on setup (before that they all just used a default channel, so for a few years manually reconfiguring my router to use a different channel other than default would put me in a clean area of the spectrum few neighbours used) because Wi-Fi bandwidth by then had become was so bad whenliving in an appartment because of ther being so many people with their own networks in such close proximity.