Network Hardware Behavior

A few months ago, I started monitoring my network with Smokeping, more about it later.

I’d also never bothered to check the speed of powerline ethernet. It “feels faster” than WiFi, so I was happy.

When I did my last Velop upgrade to OpenWrt, I did the physical manipulation at my home office desk using the powerline ethernet for various phases of the install.

I can see an interesting bump in the Smokeping latency graphs.

My Kea DHCP server gave that Velop the same IPv4 address before, during, and after I switched the Velop to OpenWrt. In fact, the powerline ethernet is plugged into the same TP-Link router that the Velop was before the upgrade and after. The only difference between low latencies, and the high latency mesa, is the interposition of the powerline ethernet.

When I first saw the increase in latency, I had the Velop in question on the powerline ethernet, and I blamed the increase on OpenWrt vs proprietary, cheating, firmware. After I moved the Velop back to directly cabled to the ethernet router, latencies dropped to their previous level.

Looks like whatever protocol(s) that powerline ethernet uses imposes either a latency, or an overall performance drop.