Home phoneline network, cheap, small, and USB

JeffMD · 06-20-2001, 03:10 PM

for the past few weeks ive been useing 2wire's PCport adapters to connect my laptop to my cabe modem (more accuratly.. to my server which is hooked to my cable modem) and just wanted to shout out my opinion of this little wonder.

These units where hidden among the 2wire home portal display at compusa, and paticularly for good reason. The 2wire home portal is a $200 beast of a router that has a home phoneline connection built in and is directly targeted for home users featuring a pretty impressive software setup. 2wires PCport how ever is what im talking about. It is an impressivly cheap ($50 each, the cheapest 10Mbit phoneline network at compusa) small (about the dimensions of a small disposable camera) 10mbit USB phoneline network adapter, self powered from the usb line and has a power and link/traffic light. its made to be used with the portal, but it dosnt need to be. The adapter itself just comes with a driver and thats it (Btw this was also what drew me twards it, the PC port driver supports win9x, WinME, Win2000, and NT even I think). The ICS setup software how ever onl ycomes with the portal. it does however point to some online documentation on there site on how to setup a shared internet connection useing ICS (online documentation in the way of an acrobat document) so while theres no inbox support, they will still tell you how to setup 2+ devices to share an internet connection.

The devices installed on my server which had win2k on it (asus p2b-f btw, running a celeron 500) installed fine as did it on my laptop with windows ME. it took me about 30 min to read the online documentation.. mostly in part because I had to install acrobat reader. ICS is pretty self contained... it was only a few clicks for the instalation, a reboot, and both computers where online. not to bad, the only problem i ran into was I irc alot, and I needed some way for Ident request to reach my laptop. Port redirection in win2k isnt all that hard... but it requires that my laptops IP remain the same for ever, this is what ICS was not happy about. Any time I tried to make my IP static on my laptop, ICS went away. it didnt just stop working, it poofed. When ICS is up you get a bunch of new bindings in the network properties window, but as soon as I made the ip static, it all went away. and going into windows program setup, it showed ics wasnt installed, so that wasnt going to work. I ended up just running an ident server on my win2k server.

After doing some bandwidth test, I found some good things and strange things. the actual phoneline connect yielded around 200Kbytes a second.. transfering files from my laptop to my win 2k server. Its not 10Mbit but POTs arnt exactly ethernet grade wireing either, I was happy. the strange thing was my internet bandwidth, I can only squeeze about 100Kbytes a second from the internet. My cable modems cap is 250Kbytes and my win2k server had no problem reaching that to my news server, but when connecting on my laptop and over the ics, it slowed to 100mbit for some reason. for now im letting it slide but if anyone has any ideas why the ICS setup is halving my bandwidth.. shoot me a reply here. I've also found the PC port is very hybernate friendly, as it never complains or fubars windows if its missing when come out of hybernation, and its pretty fast at resecuring its connection with the server.

Anyways.. the PC port seems like the ideal inexpensive power user solution for a home phone line adapter with its multitude of OS support, size, USB connection, and price.

Ranger_abx · 06-20-2001, 10:06 PM

Nice little unit. I hadn't heard of it before.

I'm curious, did the doc explain how it actually handles the phone wires? The reason I ask is DSL. Phone calls use, I believe, up to 4khz of the bandwidth, and DSL uses above 4 khz up to some amount that I can't remember. Does this use the part above the DSL section?

I've personally never used ICS, but I'd be interested in the slowdown answer when you figure it out.

JeffMD · 06-20-2001, 11:10 PM

It follows the HPN (home phoneline network) 1.0 and 2.0 standerds, im not sure the exact khz range but they are reserved ranges for these such devices. HPN's will not effect voice or DSL, as it is suggested for cable and dsl routing.

oh and a rough layout of the standerds... 1.0 was for the older 1.5mbit devices.. 2.0 was created for the 10mbit devices...

06-20-2001, 03:10 PM	#1
JeffMD Otaku Join Date: Apr 2001 Posts: 739	Home phoneline network, cheap, small, and USB for the past few weeks ive been useing 2wire's PCport adapters to connect my laptop to my cabe modem (more accuratly.. to my server which is hooked to my cable modem) and just wanted to shout out my opinion of this little wonder. These units where hidden among the 2wire home portal display at compusa, and paticularly for good reason. The 2wire home portal is a $200 beast of a router that has a home phoneline connection built in and is directly targeted for home users featuring a pretty impressive software setup. 2wires PCport how ever is what im talking about. It is an impressivly cheap ($50 each, the cheapest 10Mbit phoneline network at compusa) small (about the dimensions of a small disposable camera) 10mbit USB phoneline network adapter, self powered from the usb line and has a power and link/traffic light. its made to be used with the portal, but it dosnt need to be. The adapter itself just comes with a driver and thats it (Btw this was also what drew me twards it, the PC port driver supports win9x, WinME, Win2000, and NT even I think). The ICS setup software how ever onl ycomes with the portal. it does however point to some online documentation on there site on how to setup a shared internet connection useing ICS (online documentation in the way of an acrobat document) so while theres no inbox support, they will still tell you how to setup 2+ devices to share an internet connection. The devices installed on my server which had win2k on it (asus p2b-f btw, running a celeron 500) installed fine as did it on my laptop with windows ME. it took me about 30 min to read the online documentation.. mostly in part because I had to install acrobat reader. ICS is pretty self contained... it was only a few clicks for the instalation, a reboot, and both computers where online. not to bad, the only problem i ran into was I irc alot, and I needed some way for Ident request to reach my laptop. Port redirection in win2k isnt all that hard... but it requires that my laptops IP remain the same for ever, this is what ICS was not happy about. Any time I tried to make my IP static on my laptop, ICS went away. it didnt just stop working, it poofed. When ICS is up you get a bunch of new bindings in the network properties window, but as soon as I made the ip static, it all went away. and going into windows program setup, it showed ics wasnt installed, so that wasnt going to work. I ended up just running an ident server on my win2k server. After doing some bandwidth test, I found some good things and strange things. the actual phoneline connect yielded around 200Kbytes a second.. transfering files from my laptop to my win 2k server. Its not 10Mbit but POTs arnt exactly ethernet grade wireing either, I was happy. the strange thing was my internet bandwidth, I can only squeeze about 100Kbytes a second from the internet. My cable modems cap is 250Kbytes and my win2k server had no problem reaching that to my news server, but when connecting on my laptop and over the ics, it slowed to 100mbit for some reason. for now im letting it slide but if anyone has any ideas why the ICS setup is halving my bandwidth.. shoot me a reply here. I've also found the PC port is very hybernate friendly, as it never complains or fubars windows if its missing when come out of hybernation, and its pretty fast at resecuring its connection with the server. Anyways.. the PC port seems like the ideal inexpensive power user solution for a home phone line adapter with its multitude of OS support, size, USB connection, and price.
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06-20-2001, 10:06 PM	#2
Ranger_abx Masked Man Join Date: Feb 2001 Location: Portland, Oregon Posts: 169	Nice little unit. I hadn't heard of it before. I'm curious, did the doc explain how it actually handles the phone wires? The reason I ask is DSL. Phone calls use, I believe, up to 4khz of the bandwidth, and DSL uses above 4 khz up to some amount that I can't remember. Does this use the part above the DSL section? I've personally never used ICS, but I'd be interested in the slowdown answer when you figure it out.
(Offline)

06-20-2001, 11:10 PM	#3
JeffMD Otaku Join Date: Apr 2001 Posts: 739	It follows the HPN (home phoneline network) 1.0 and 2.0 standerds, im not sure the exact khz range but they are reserved ranges for these such devices. HPN's will not effect voice or DSL, as it is suggested for cable and dsl routing. oh and a rough layout of the standerds... 1.0 was for the older 1.5mbit devices.. 2.0 was created for the 10mbit devices...
(Offline)

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