Is Powerline adapter a good replacement for complete wired Ethernet?
Powerline adapters work by sending data signals through your home's electrical wiring.
Sounds convenient until you realize the wiring inside your walls was never meant to carry MHz frequency data signals.
Normal household electricity runs at 50/60Hz.
Powerline communication injects signals in the 2 MHz to 86 MHz range directly onto the wiring.
At those frequencies, your house wiring stops behaving like simple power conductors and starts behaving like a giant antenna system.
This is basic antenna physics
A wire becomes an efficient radiator once its length exceeds roughly 1/20th of the signal wavelength.
For a 1 MHz signal, that threshold is about 15 meters.
For 10 MHz, it's roughly 1.5 meters.
Your home contains hundreds of meters of wiring.
The signal doesn’t stay confined to the wire. It radiates into the room. Into the air. Into the bed you sleep in.
And it gets worse..
Latest Powerline adapters use MIMO transmission.
Instead of using just Line-Neutral,
they now inject signals onto:
Line-Neutral
Line-Ground
Neutral-Ground
Meaning even the grounding system becomes part of the transmission path.
