 After
another day of flogging the office wireless connection it struck us
that our earlier flirtations with Ethernet over mains had shown us
another way. The problem with wireless is the quality of the
connection or QOS. Wireless may be fine in an American home made of
wooden walls or thin ones at the very least, the average UK home has
some pretty sturdy walls even the interior ones. This makes a 54G
network struggle to reach all areas of the house and while it may
show you as connected the QOS or quality of service may not be up to
much.
Now this may not seem like an issue if all you are doing is some
basic web browsing or email but if you start to stream video you
will soon see the problem. Video starts to stall and stutter on a
poor quality connection and some smarter application turn the speed
down and buffer more. Then if you start to use a more critical
application like uploading a stream of audio or video you soon find
that wireless is not the way.
So that takes us back to Ethernet over mains, which after all is an
obvious choice as every house has mains and no doubt the PC you want
to connect will be plugged into it. The Ethernet over mains
standards have been around for donkeys years and we are at a loss as
to why wireless has such a tight grip over in home networks when the
54g variant is so ropey. In fact watch Cisco and others who are
about to push wireless N in the new year (once they have cleared
stocks of G kit) as a solution to this very problem.So at a
stroke your 54g network will be old hat as will be your laptop with
its embedded wireless card. We were lucky enough to have an
alternate delivered to us for a play, the Netgear HDX101 mains over
Ethernet (or powerline) adaptor. Once out of the box this had to be
the quickest set-up of any gadget we have ever had, plug on unit
into the router via Cat 5 cable (RJ45) and into the mains
electricity and the other into a mains socket next to the PC and
again into its rj45 socket. The lights on the front start to glow
including a very bright blue LED and we were connected.
An important point to note here is that not all Ethernet over
mains systems are equal, many are only capable of 10mbps which may
be fine for sharing a 2mb broadband link but its hardly a home
network, there are also 45 and 85mbps variants but this Netgear
HDX101 is a whopping 200mbits. We had out machines hooked up in
minutes and speed tests showed the full 200mbps was available and
out internet connection although much lower than the 200mbps had
immediately reduced latency and a lower ping time, critical to
gamers.
We then set about some streaming tests to check if the quality of
service had improved compared to a wireless network. We managed to
stream up high quality audio glitch free for an hour something our
wireless has never managed and the video download tests worked well
almost making the BBC's iPlayer work reliably (almost).
Running as part of a network up to 16 HDX101 units can be added
to the mains system joining the 200mbps circuit networking as many
machines and a full blown Ethernet 10/100 switch. The beauty of
course is that you don't have to lay additional cat 5 cabling round
the house, instead the powerline system transfers data with a high
QOS.
It really does amaze us that Ethernet over mains has been so
overlooked as a viable system for home networks, after all most PC's
at home (even laptops) are plugged into the mains. Manufacturers
could help by building this into laptops so that they detected the
network through power packs as opposed to needing an outboard unit.
Sadly for now Ethernet over mains and the excellent Netgear
HDX101 units remain a well kept secret and at under £100 for a pair
for the 200mbps system its just as well or you and I would struggle
to find them in the shops. This Netgear networking system comes
highly recommended by Lordpercy.com
Published - 22/12/2007
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