TP-LINK TL-PA8030P Reviewed

[Dan-H]

My Location E for the powerline tests has many wall-wart adapters plugged in. I unplug them ALL while I test, even adapters in the next room.

I'm not sure I understand your reply.

I'm guessing the AC power converters can add noise back onto the house wiring. If this is the case, good thing we only have about a hundred of these all over the house

That said, I've found an outlet strip, even cheapies with no surge protection or filtering, can provide some high-frequency noise filtering. So you have that going for you in your setup.

So if this is the case, then plugging the power adapters into power strips with some line filtering might help keep the noise down on the house wiring?

If this isn't the case, please enlighten me.

 

[sfx2000]

How important is it to wire this to match the picture on the left vs the sad face picture on the right?

Pretty important with PLC adapters - direct into the wall, and with adapters with pass-through plug, plug directly into them or into a power strip behind the adapter...

Most wall-wart adapters are what we can consider Switching DC adapters, and some have better isolation on the high voltage side than others...

A switching DC adapter basically turns the 50/60Hz on the mains to a very high frequency, and then converts to DC from there - it's a long story, but cheap adapters generate a lot of noise back to the mains - it's small compared to the mains, but it's there, and that's where PLC also lives... and the signal levels across the PLC link are actually pretty low as they're basically RF across the mains wire - that's why we see very strong error correction and deep modulation techniques...

 

[thiggins]

Location E explained here:
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/lanwan-howto/31625-how-we-test-powerline-products

I'm saying high frequency noise can travel farther than you think. Even a simple no-filtering power strip or extension cord can provide some amount of filtering.

That said, if you're getting the performance you want/need, stop tinkering and worrying and enjoy.

 

[Dan-H]

Location E explained here:
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/lanwan-howto/31625-how-we-test-powerline-products

I'm saying high frequency noise can travel farther than you think. Even a simple no-filtering power strip or extension cord can provide some amount of filtering.

That said, if you're getting the performance you want/need, stop tinkering and worrying and enjoy.

I'm only getting about 150 to 200 Mbps according to the utility. It is better than the WiFi bridge I setup, but not much better.

I was expecting more. I'll update firmware, and re-arrange some things on the AC side of the plug to see if it can be improved.

I'll also setup some reasonable throughput tests. The client system is my son's so I'm competing with Jedi or assassins or creepers to get time on the system

I wanted more throughput so I could plug in my spare router as a second access point upstairs, but at this speed, the current wifi upstairs is just as fast.

 

[sfx2000]

I'm saying high frequency noise can travel farther than you think. Even a simple no-filtering power strip or extension cord can provide some amount of filtering.

I'll add to the usual suspects - LED light bulbs - some can generate huge amounts of broadband noise that affects both WiFi and PLC applications...

 

[loekf]

Quick update - since flashing the AV1200's with the Mar 2016 firmware, the drop-out issues I've been having seem to have gone away.

Can grab the update here - http://www.tp-link.us/download/TL-PA8030P-KIT.html#Firmware

BTW - the admin utils they have on the Web Site are Windows only, but if you contact TP-Link support, they do have a beta version for Macintosh... be persistent, not all reps on Tier 1 know about it, but Tier 2 does...

I got fed up with the random dropouts of two TL-PA8010Ps. TP-Link released new firmware in February, but still dropouts. In the change notes there is a mysterious remark about power levels (according to standard) and more compliance stuff. Tomorrow I want to try three different units: TL-TP8030P with this March firmware, the TL-TP9020 having a Broadcom chipset (indeed, confirmed by looking at the firmware file) and the D-Link 701AV (also Broadcom).

Just wondering, did you suffer from zero dropouts since July ? In addition, you didn't run any ping script ?

I notice the dropouts in two ways:

• When watching Netflix, there's suddenly a spinning disk on my AppleTV4 or my Nvidia Shield gets buffering issues. Usually it gets back after 1-2 minutes, but usually you have to quit/kill the Netflix app, wait and wait, then try again.
• On my Mac internet is gone. A fix (sometimes) is to reset DHCP.

I hope based on what people wrote I'm onto something and can fix this.

 

[sfx2000]

I got fed up with the random dropouts of two TL-PA8010Ps. TP-Link released new firmware in February, but still dropouts. In the change notes there is a mysterious remark about power levels (according to standard) and more compliance stuff. Tomorrow I want to try three different units: TL-TP8030P with this March firmware, the TL-TP9020 having a Broadcom chipset (indeed, confirmed by looking at the firmware file) and the D-Link 701AV (also Broadcom).

Just wondering, did you suffer from zero dropouts since July ? In addition, you didn't run any ping script ?

I notice the dropouts in two ways:

• When watching Netflix, there's suddenly a spinning disk on my AppleTV4 or my Nvidia Shield gets buffering issues. Usually it gets back after 1-2 minutes, but usually you have to quit/kill the Netflix app, wait and wait, then try again.
• On my Mac internet is gone. A fix (sometimes) is to reset DHCP.

I hope based on what people wrote I'm onto something and can fix this.

It was good for a while, but the dropout have started again - the March 2016 firmware update (followed by a full reset of all units) helped, but the dropout issue is back - not sure if this is something environmental on my grid, but it does seem to line up on a periodic basis - maybe it's the Smart Electric Meter, even though I'm told it's not communicating over PLC, but over wireless (San Diego Gas & Electric is the power company).

There's been some chatter about it being characteristic of QC-Atheros and the QCA7500 chipset, and other chatter about it being TP-Link in general (given that many of the TP-Link PLC's are Atheros based) - part of the issue with the chatter, while reports are common, these are very popular devices, and nobody ever complains if it's working, so we get a distorted view based on negative comments that so far, are unresolved, and TP-Link hasn't been very helpful towards finding a solution for the dropout issue (if and when it hits, it's persistent enough, but my gut tells me that it's probably not as bad as it sounds, maybe 20 percent of the user base is seeing the problem).

It's something I can live with at the moment, as it's not very often that it occurs, and it usually clears up, and it's on a less used leg of the overall home network here - I've thought about moving over to a Broadcom based solution, but I've been busy with some work stuff, and the weekends are busy right now, so really haven't had much of a chance to explore HPAV options based on Broadcom.

 

[loekf]

I have to give it probably a few days to see if dropouts occur. My network is also nothing special. The VDSL modem is in the switchboard ("meterkast in Dutch"). The first TP-Link is there as well, which ultimately connects to a 2nd unit in the living room. Both are on the same circuit.

I had Devolo's before and they had exactly the same issue and even a higher occurrence of dropouts. The symptoms are the same, all status LEDs remain good, but there is no network traffic for 1-2 minutes. I sticked with the TP-Links, because they give higher throughput.

I will report back my findings.

 

[Zirescu]

Bought my PA8030P kit last week as I was getting fed up with the 2.4Ghz signals getting clobbered by all the new neighbours coming online and the 5GHz just didn't reach far enough around the house from the basement and no easy way to move it out of the basement. Connected one of the power lines to the main router RT-87U in the basement and the other to my office on the top floor and connected most of my devices to a network switch off of one of the three ports and turned my RT-N66U into an AP that now only has the 5GHz radio setup on it off of the second of three ports. So far so good, moved the majority of the wireless devices to use only the 5GHz radio and now have full coverage in the house and up the street.

I did notice that when I fire up the paper shredder that is connected to the same outlet as the power line in the office that the signal will drop out (especially when I'm shredding files pretty constantly) so I know now not to do any shredding while doing large file transfers.

I also did attempt to use the power line in the basement plugged into my Cyberpower UPS when I first went to setup the devices but the power line reported poor signal and wouldn't connect to the office power line so ended up moving it to it's own power plug and plugged the UPS into the AC port of the power line.

Also updated the firmware to the 160328 the other day and haven't seen any drop outs. I work from home and the laptop that was giving me the most grief when originally wired into my RT-N66U (when I had it wired in and the N66U in media bridge mode), hasn't dropped at all. Usually I would have a Skype call drop out on me after 30 minutes. Had a 4 hour call the other day and zero drop outs and as an added bonus my VPN connection to our datacenter stayed up the entire day.

 

[loekf]

Thanks for the story. I also got the PA8030P kit in yesterday, but didn't open the box yet.

I swapped my PA8010P kit for the P9020Ps yesterday. I didnt have time for thorough testing, but my impression so far:

- Performance in my home is about the same as the PA8010Ps. Let's say 50 MB/s (guess it translates to 500 Mbps with overhead) with peaks to 60 MB/s (600 Mbps). Both PA9020Ps sit on the same group, one in the metering cabinet, the other in the living room. Still have to plug in my laptop to see what tpPLC Utility says. However, as I have seen with Devolo's the reported up/down link speed has little correlation with the actual speed. My VDSL line is 100 Mbps. The Devolo tool (very very similar to TP-Links) reports 800 Mbps. However, keep in mind it's the combined up/down speed of the link.
- I managed to watch 2 hours of Netflix without dropouts. Haven't seen what with the PA8010Ps.

My impression is that there's definitely a stability difference between the Qualcomm (TP-Links AV1200 products, same for Netgear etc) and Broadcom based products.

 

[sfx2000]

Performance in my home is about the same as the PA8010Ps. Let's say 50 MB/s (guess it translates to 500 Mbps with overhead) with peaks to 60 MB/s (600 Mbps). Both PA9020Ps sit on the same group, one in the metering cabinet, the other in the living room. Still have to plug in my laptop to see what tpPLC Utility says. However, as I have seen with Devolo's the reported up/down link speed has little correlation with the actual speed.

The PA8030P and the PA8010P should be about the same, as they're the same basic design, the 8030P just adds the additional switched port...

The TP-Link PLC util shows the PHY rate at the HPAV layer, not the network throughput rate - mine at the moment is reporting 507Mbps, and this at the network layer, at least in my case, translates to around 110Mbps according to iperf3 in both directions...

 

[loekf]

The PA8030P and the PA8010P should be about the same, as they're the same basic design, the 8030P just adds the additional switched port...

The TP-Link PLC util shows the PHY rate at the HPAV layer, not the network throughput rate - mine at the moment is reporting 507Mbps, and this at the network layer, at least in my case, translates to around 110Mbps according to iperf3 in both directions...

The PHY rate is confusing. I still remember my first reaction with Devolo's tool when you see "900 Mbps" pop up. Then it turns out this is bi-directional and has no relation to the actual (ethernet) bit rate. In my case this was 50-70 Mbps from my VDSL connection.

Found this presentation:

http://www.slideshare.net/SCEETeam/2012-1004-achaichia

Having worked on digital terrestrial and cable TV in the past, that helped a bit.

 

[sfx2000]

Having worked on digital terrestrial and cable TV in the past, that helped a bit.

This might also help...

http://www.homeplug.org/media/filer...aa82-179e6e95cab5/hpav-white-paper_050818.pdf

 

[loekf]

This might also help...

http://www.homeplug.org/media/filer...aa82-179e6e95cab5/hpav-white-paper_050818.pdf

Thanks.

Actually it's interesting to see that TP Links tool reports a link speed of close to 1400 Mbps, but the actual network speed (via Ookla) to the outside world is 55 Mbps. So that's an overhead of 25x per bit.

I returned the other Powerline units I ordered and kept the PA9020Ps. However, coming week I'm going to experiment with MOCA (2.0, so max. 400 Mbps it seems). It's not that common here in Europe, guess because it's more of a hassle to install. I'm most curious whether there's any degradation on the cable TV signals. However, these are active boxes, so maybe there's no drop. For sure, I have no splitters in my cabling here. The AOP is only connected to the living room.

 

[RogerSC]

I was seeing less than 100Mbps with a pair of these at my house....more like 75Mbps. just going from my router to the dining room (different circuits, unfortunately). Returned them. We must have really bad house wiring *smile*. Not even as fast as the MoCA 1.1 that I have...I see that going up to about 90Mbps, has been stable as well.

I'm looking at MoCA 2.0 now. Have been holding off until I see if I need to go to satellite TV, but just got an acceptable 2 year contract deal with Comcast, so I may be trying it soon.

 

[loekf]

I was seeing less than 100Mbps with a pair of these at my house....more like 75Mbps. just going from my router to the dining room (different circuits, unfortunately). Returned them. We must have really bad house wiring *smile*. Not even as fast as the MoCA 1.1 that I have...I see that going up to about 99Mbps, has been stable as well.

I'm looking at MoCA 2.0 now. Have been holding off until I see if I need to go to satellite TV, but just got an acceptable 2 year contract deal with Comcast, so I may be trying it soon.

My TL-PA9020Ps for some reason decided to go up to 70 Mbps (from 50 Mbps) for two days in a row now. I didn't change a thing with respect to minimizing interference.

Received my MOCA 2.0 package (2 demods, cables), but I have to rework my switchboard / utilities cabinet a bit to make it fit, so that's a task for tonight.

My expectation is also that I can max out my router with this setup. Just hope it's stable.

 

[MarkyPancake]

I can't get my router to see my pair of TL-PA8030P as 1 Gbps link state.

I've recently upgraded the router from an Asus RT-AC68U to the AC86U and have decided to run the Xbox One X through my pair of TL-PA8030P again.

When I do a speed test on the Xbox wired through the adapters, I get less than 100 Mbps results, whereas on the Wi-Fi it consistently gets close to our broadband service's 200 down speed. I then noticed in the router admin pages, the Powerline connection is showing as 100 Mbps link state and not 1 Gbps (the WAN link state is 1 Gbps).

The router has Gigabit LAN ports, both Powerline adapters have Gigabit ports, the Xbox One X has a Gigabit port, and the cables connecting it all are CAT7.

Any ideas on what I can try to, because the 100 Mbps link state is stopping the Xbox from benefiting from more of our download speed?

Edit: I think I've sussed it. I disconnected all devices bar the X1X from one end, then disconnected the other end from the router and reconnected it and now the router admin pages are showing a 1 Gbps link state. I forgot my old 360 was connected to the adapter, so that must has been locking it down at 100 Mbps, until I cleared it.