

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Much of the marketing around wireless routers, extenders, and other networking equipment focuses on dealing with range problems—your house is too big, so the back bedroom doesn't get a strong Wi-Fi signal. But for people like myself who live in apartments or condos in extremely dense urban neighborhoods, range is not the only problem. Interference from neighbors' networks is the chief villain.

Worse, renters are often prohibited by their leases from making modifications to the apartment like running Ethernet cables inside the walls, or sometimes even pinning Ethernet cables to the outside of the walls. For those apartment dwellers, there are few options.

Powerline networking adapters are a black sheep exception, but they don't get a lot of attention for good reason: early products in this category were awful in a lot of ways. From inconsistent performance to flickering lamps, they've had a spotty history. They've gotten gradually better, but are they good enough to solve the problem yet?

One of the more recent attempts to make powerline networking work 'no seriously for real this time' is Ubiquiti's EtherMagic. The company provided a review kit to Ars, and we decided to use it to test whether the tech is finally where it needs to be. Consider this our quick dive into whether this technology is currently a viable alternative to Wi-Fi at all more than a review of the kit itself.

About the kit

New York-based Ubiquiti makes wireless networking products for a variety of markets, and it has a few consumer products of note like a wireless mesh networking kit. EtherMagic is the company's powerline networking kit; the full kit comes with one switch and three receivers.

If you're not familiar with powerline kits, the concept is straightforward: you plug a Switch into a wall power socket in your home or office, and then plug one receiver (Ubiquiti's kit calls them EndPoints) into another wall power socket. The Switch connects to your router or modem via Ethernet and uses your home's electrical system to transmit data back and forth with the EndPoint. It was extremely easy to set up; Ubiquiti provides an app for connecting an EndPoint to your Switch should you add another EndPoint, but all the EndPoints that come with the Switch in the kit are already synced. It is quite literally plug and play.

When you plug an EndPoint in, you'll see a blue LED indicator that shows how strong a signal is. Like wireless signal indicators, more bars is better. The quality of the connection depends greatly on the quality of the wiring in your building, along with a bunch of other factors likely out of your control, especially if you're a renter. But if everything is ideal, it is very fast and effective—more so than Wi-Fi in many situations. In many earlier powerline kits, performance was inconsistent, power was drawn even when data wasn't being transferred, and other electronic devices in the home or office were impacted negatively.

More recent products have gradually addressed many of these problems, hence now being a good time to revisit this tech. I didn't experience any of the above problems with this kit, but your mileage could very well vary based on your wiring and other factors.

About the location

I live in a large apartment building in one of the densest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, with a population of around 22,000 people per square mile—comparable to the Mission in San Francisco, Lincoln Park in Chicago, or Williamsburg in Brooklyn. It's a far cry from many parts of Manhattan, but it's a much more dense area than most Americans live within. There are a lot of neighbors in close proximity and a lot of Wi-Fi networks around the standard 1, 6, and 11 channels.

The situation, then, is that interference makes 2.4GHz wireless basically nonfunctional unless I'm right next to the wireless router. 5GHz is better because there are generally fewer people using those channels, but it's still slower and spottier than I'd like. I'm prohibited by my lease from running Ethernet cables either inside the wall or attached to the wall; they would have to be laid out across the floor. I've chosen not to do that for both aesthetic and safety reasons.

My apartment has two bedrooms and is around 1,000 square feet. The modem (a Time Warner cable modem) and router (an Apple Airport Extreme—admittedly not the strongest) are located in the living room, as connection quality is most important to me with regard to 4K video streaming and console gaming on the TV. Everything in my entertainment center is connected to the router with Ethernet. Everything else uses Wi-Fi.

One of the bedrooms is used as an office, where I keep a Windows desktop PC and a VoIP phone—this is also where I typically do my work on a 2016 15-inch Touch Bar MacBook Pro, which will serve as the testing device. I use the office as my workspace because it gets the most light, but, unfortunately, it has the most Wi-Fi problems, too. It's oriented toward most of the other apartments in my building and their respective Wi-Fi signals.

Finally, there's the bedroom. I usually only use my phone in bed, but I sometimes watch Netflix on my phone before I fall asleep, and I occasionally have streaming problems. The bedroom is at the corner of the building, so none of the walls is shared with other apartments. Thus, interference is lower here.