Is PowerLine IoT a thing?

Imagine a smart home with no hubs that just connects.

I had another idea the other day. Imagine if when you bought your smart home products you wouldn’t have to worry about connecting them to your network. Imagine that as soon as your screwed in your light bulb or plugged in you smart socket it was automatically connected to your network. No Password required.

I may have, theoretically at least, found the solution. It’s a mix of two technologies, one that been around for a while and one that is currently being worked on by Apple, google and a few others. Let me explain.

The first part of my idea is that rather than connecting your product to your wifi you just plug it in and works using a similar system to PowerLine adapters. If you’ve not come across them before they are plug sockets that you attached a network cable to, both at your network source and where you want you network connection to be spread to, and then you can transfer data over your homes power lines.

That gets rid of the wireless network, instantly making your IoT devices more secure, but what about the communication? That’s where the Connected Home over IP Project comes in. Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance have got together to work on a protocol that would all devices from different manufactures to be controlled using one app of the user choice, using the latest in security features and hopefully without the need to route everything via the internet (which is likely considering Apple’s involvement).

The second part of my would have an Ethernet Switch that would enable you to provide a PowerLine Connection to the wires in your house. Rather than having a single 1GB/s connection over your home’s powerlines having a multi-port switch that is capable of say 2.5GB/s or 10GB/s would enable your devices to connect faster. It could also provide a way of creating VLANs over PowerLine. So you could have all of your IoT devices on VLAN 101 and your PowerLine Ethernet adaptors on VLAN 102.

As all of the Smart devices would be using the Project Connected Home Blueprint they would all run over IP and be controllable from a central interface. It would also be great if you could control the devices over MQTT too, this would allow you to connect them to Home Assistant without having to either clog up your wireless bandwidth or setting up a separate wireless network for your IoT Devices.

I really do think, with the right network security, that this solution would be far more secure than a wifi-based system, whilst providing better bandwidth to devices that can only connect to your network via Wifi, such as tablets and smartphones.

If this idea became a reality then setting up your devices would be ridiculously easy, plug it in and turn it on. You could still have simple webpages on each devices to enable extra services such as MQTT like devices flashed with Tasmota or ESP Home do at present, allowing you to customise your IoT devices with ease.

And for those devices that are powered by PoE, there are a variety of PowerLine PoE injectors on the market so your PoE Cameras and Wireless Access Points would still be able to connect to their controllers without you having to run a ton of network cable too. It would be even better still if there was one singular place to manage everything in your IoT network via Home Assistant, but with better integration. Imagine if you could control your Ubiquiti network (or at least the basic stuff such as Access Point & Security management) alongside your PoE CCTV Camera and Smart Sockets and Switches without all of the hassle of trying to find the right integrations or plugins.

I know this is probably a pie in the sky dream as it would involve a lot of companies working together. I know that the Project Connected Home Partners have made a start but I can’t see the companies who make PoweLine products joining this group, or if they do it will not be any time soon. If I had the resources behind me I’d love to start this as a project and see if it could go somewhere. I’d love to just wire up a smart dimmer, extension lead or access point and have them working automatically but unfortunately, I don’t have the capital behind me or even know where to begin.

Would you like PowerLine technology in your smart devices? Can you see PowerLine manufactures joining Project Connected Home? What PowerLine Devices would you like to see? Let me know in the comments below.