Question about Devolo Powerline intermittent timeouts
Question about Devolo Powerline intermittent timeouts
Hello,
I've recently moved into a new apartment and set up a simple powerline network (Devolo Magic 2) due to the quirks of the cable placements. I have one adapter in a separate room for my server and two in the living room for my PC and router respectively. They are stable most of the time, except every 15-20 minutes (sometimes every other hour) the connection times out for a few seconds. I've somewhat confirmed that the adapters don't lose connection with each other. I've done a few rounds of pinging the adapters and the router both from inside and outside the network. The conclusion is, when timeouts happen, I cannot reach beyond the adapters but I do reach other adpaters inside the powerline network. I also cannot reach into the network from outside i.e. something connected to wifi but i reach the router itself just fine. I've read about the possibility that smart electricity meters might interfere, but i turned off the feature where it reads the usage data every 15 minutes, which didn't improve things. The building is barely 4 years old so i doubt it's old wiring making problems. Any household applicances can also be ruled out as I saw no noticable drop in performance when the fridge or the microwave turn on. Next I suspected that one of the adapters might be faulty, specifically the one connected to the router. I swapped it with seemingly some improvements, but after a while there was another timeout, albeit it hasn't been as frequent as before. I'm sorta running out of ideas here. If I don't find a solution i will have to directly wire into the PC from the router at least since that one is most sensitive to timeouts. My server requires the powerline network though as there is not real alternative. If it's any help, the adapters operate at a constant CPU temperature of roughly 90°C and have VDSL compatibility set to MIMO 17a.
Weirdly enough, I used to have powerline adapters at my parents house and never noticed anything like that, even though the adapters were older and much further apart physically.
Also, I know powerline is not an ideal solution and something like MoCA or mesh wifi would be better, but my server does not have wifi and there is no way i will either run new wires in the walls or lay down a 15m wire to my server as it would require drilling through walls.
Do you have any device directly connected to the router for verification, so you can ensure it isn't related to your internet stability? From what I understand, the router is connected to a power line unit, and when issues arise you can still send pings from your computer to the router's IP address. I haven't used powerline devices in several years, so you might not be able to log into them or perform pings. The units I previously used lacked IP addresses and relied on different protocols for access.
Yeah. I verified it several times that my connection was stable. I connected my PC directly to the router to double-check, while also testing the connection on my server. When the link drops, I can't ping the router's IP from a device using a powerline adapter. The adapters I use have addresses I can reach, and I confirmed this to support my observations.
Does your router have the capacity to send pings? Can it reach the poweline IP address? It would be unusual if the router could communicate with powerline devices, yet fail to connect to them as well. I’d suspect a problem with the cable linking the powerline and the router, or perhaps an odd issue with that specific powerline unit connected to the router. Would you try swapping the powerline units to check for differences?
Poweline devices seem quite basic. I’m a bit surprised they still have IP addresses nowadays—they mostly function like a mix of a switch and a simple hub. They only manage MAC addresses, which makes it hard to understand how they track traffic between all powerline units. Many years ago this was the norm, but now devolo units use different technology than the older powerline models I’ve examined closely.
The router I received from my ISP seems quite basic. I'm frustrated about that too. Regarding communication with other powerline devices, it's likely they couldn't connect either. I connected directly to the router with my PC and wasn't able to ping any powerline device, even the one right next to it.
I changed the units and initially thought it would work better. But I kept getting timeouts. I believe this issue improved, but I need to test it thoroughly for a full day to see consistent results since there doesn't seem to be a clear pattern. Sometimes I experience multiple timeouts each hour, and recently I've had just one or two per hour for both adapters.
It appears the device adjusted itself automatically. It might have been incomplete during setup, but a full day of testing revealed only minor timeouts, mainly due to occasional network fluctuations that couldn't be clearly linked to the powerline connection. All units are currently operational except for the one connected to the router, which is now on my PC and vice versa. I plan to exchange it with the server unit to assess its impact on performance, especially since the average ping seems slightly higher on my PC. If everything remains stable over the next few days, I'll reactivate the 15-minute readings to verify the problem and will report back. It's not urgent as the refund period has already ended.