Netgear Wall-Plugged Ethernet Bridge - OUTSTANDING Performance!

In the 3+ years that I've been reviewing products on this site, I think I can count the times that I have given a product 5 stars across the board; I'm a tough customer, and I expect a lot for my time and money.

I wish I could say that after careful research I chose the Netgear Wall-Plugged Ethernet Bridge, but that simply isn't the case. In fact, before I purchased it I knew very little about it at all. I went to the local CompUSA today in desperation; once again, my grand scheme to grant my wife internet access had gone awry.

I have tried the wireless route, but my base station and my wife's computer are as far away as you can get and still be in my house; 3 stories apart and in opposite corners. Although the distance is well within the operational limits of wireless technology, the results have always been disappointing. Most recently, I tried the Microsoft wireless base station (a product that I LOVE and that works excellent with my laptop anywhere in the house) along with the Microsoft USB wireless adapter (a product that failed miserably), which, when it worked, worked very well - only it only worked for hours at a time consistently.

I also tried the Phoneline route, which proved moderately acceptable. It stayed connected fairly consistently, as long as we didn't use the handset in that room or plug any other phoneline network device in. That is, until one day it just stopped working mysteriously, and no amount of customer support, new hardware, or reinstalled software could bring the connection back.

Now, several years ago, Powerline technology was a lot like Phoneline technology - you had to have a router that supported it, sometime to the exclusion of other technologies (most notably, Phoneline or Wireless, although in recent years routers have been manufactured that support any combination of the technologies (along with Ethernet) simultaneously). So I went to the store anticipating a significant hardware purchase, and had consigned myself to an evening of reconfiguring my network.

My first surprise was that, initially, I couldn't find ANY Powerline devices. I searched the shelves high and low, and although there was an entire wall devoted to networking, nothing appeared to fit my needs. I enlisted the help of a sales clerk who took me back over to the networking section and pointed me toward a solitary stack of devices; hence my second surprise.

The Netgear Wall-Plugged Ethernet Bridge is pretty unassuming. The box it comes in is smaller than the box that my cellular telephone came in, and the actual device is about the same size.

That's it.

No router, no server, just a small device that you plug into the wall (Netgear strongly suggests that you plug it directly into the wall, not into a power strip or surge protector). One end of the included Ethernet cable goes into the Netgear Wall-Plugged Ethernet Bridge, and the other end plugs into your router or hub.

Once that's complete, you run the configuration software (which allows you to set up encryption on your Powerline network), and you're done.

Repeat the process, using a device for every computer that you want to connect (for example, if you had 3 computers that you wanted to connect to the network you would need 4 devices - 1 for each computer and 1 for the router or hub), with the Ethernet cable running from computer's NIC to the associated Netgear Wall-Plugged Ethernet Bridge, and you are all set It took me longer to install the NIC than it took me to install the Netgear Wall-Plugged Ethernet Bridge.

And the connection speeds are fantastic. I ran a speed test on my wife's computer and was able to download at the same speeds as the computer wired directly into the cable modem. And the network throughput registered routinely at 7 - 10 Mbps - far faster than it ever registered via Phoneline or Wireless.

All in all, it really is a fantastic product, and a worthy alternative to running cables through the wall.

Oh yeah - by way of comparison, my house is 25 years old, with the type wiring that goes along with that. I suspect that the performance in newer houses would be equivalent, if not better.