One of the best options we have to take the Internet connection from one place to another in the house are PLCs. They are very useful to connect with good stability and speed. They work through electrical wiring and are often better than repeaters. Now, how many devices can we connect to the PLCs ? We are going to talk about it in this article. You will see that there are differences if what you are looking for is to navigate wirelessly or by cable.
Number of Devices Supported by PLCs
It should be noted that there is no exact number of devices that you will be able to connect to your PLCs, since it will depend on the model, the quality and also the use that you give. You will be able to connect more or less depending on different situations, so you should look at a few aspects to see how many you can connect without problems.
If we start by explaining how many devices you can connect by cable to the PLCs, this will depend directly on the number of ports they have. Therefore, it will depend on the exact model you are using. There are PLC devices that do not have any Ethernet ports (they only work over Wi-Fi), others may have one, two, three… The normal thing is that they have between two and three and this is also ideal.
Things change if we ask ourselves how many devices we can connect via Wi-Fi to the PLCs. This will depend on the quality of the devices, but also on the use we give them. There is no exact figure after which they stop working, but we can say that once you connect 8 or 10 devices it will start to get worse.
However, connecting devices such as smart light bulbs or temperature sensors is not the same as connecting a television to watch streaming content in maximum quality, a computer that is downloading large files, a mobile uploading backup copies to the cloud… The greater Whether it is bandwidth consumption, the sooner we will begin to have problems connecting devices to the PLCs.
What to consider when choosing PLC
You must choose very well the PLC devices that you are going to use to surf the net, since not all of them work the same. The objective is to improve the speed of the network and to be able to connect devices without problems. There are many models available, with different features. You can always connect multiple PLC devices.
Something fundamental is to see what maximum speed they support . This is important, because if you buy very limited devices, which barely accept 100 Mbps of speed, you will not be able to take full advantage of the contracted fiber optic rate. This limit must be taken into account for both wireless and cable browsing.
It is also a good idea to look at the number of Ethernet ports available and that they are also Gigabit. This will allow you to reach a speed of up to 1 Gbps. If they are Fast Ethernet, that speed will be limited to 100 Mbps. What interests us is to be able to take full advantage of the network cable speed.
In short, as you can see there is no specific limit of devices that you can connect to the PLCs, although you will notice a loss of signal the more you connect. From 8 or 10 is when you could experience failures, although it could also be much earlier if you make a very large use of bandwidth or the devices have little power.
