Great alternative to wireless or running cables

I've used home phoneline networking, 802.11a/b/g wireless, and run cables to network the homes I've owned over the last few years.

The HomePNA phoneline stuff works pretty good. Wireless has a lot of flexibility, especially if you're using a laptop. Running cable is tough but a hardline 100mb/s connection is without peer.

My new house has an interesting problem. I have a cable modem and a couple of pc's, one of which is a laptop. There are no cable connections or phone lines in the two rooms that I have pc's. Kind of bizarre not to put a cable and phone connection in each bedroom, since the house was built just a few years ago. Oh well, I guess they saved $20 worth of cables to not install them. The attic in the house is divided in the middle by a high ceilinged living room...its passable through a very, very small passageway. Of course, the bedrooms requiring wiring are all the way at one end of the house and all the cable connections and phone lines are at the other.

So I'd probably have to hire a pro to wire the house, or run some ugly wires on the outside of the house. Neither a palatable option.

I made it worse by wanting to get a voice-over-IP phone to hook to the cable modem for unlimited long distance. Nowhere that i have a cable connection for the cable modem do I have a phone jack to plug in the VOIP box to make all the phone lines "live" in the house.

I'd been using some wireless stuff to connect the remote pc's and a tivo to the cable modem. It worked, but the performance was spotty and I occasionally had some problems where the network would just "go away" for 10-15 seconds. I also have one "network appliance" that just doesnt do WEP very well so I had to leave my network "open". I'm not real close to any neighbors, but darned if I didnt look at my access lists one day and find one of my neighbors using my wireless connection. An access control list solved that.

I still didnt have an easy way to connect the VOIP box to my interior phone lines.

When I saw these NetGear XE102 boxes on sale for ~$35 refurbished, I got a couple. I'm very, very pleased with them. They were plug and play, and I'm getting about 10Mb/s throughput. No problems, no configuration issues, no complications, and the speed is very good.

Basically you plug them into open a/c outlets (no extension cords, power strips or surge protectors please), they have an ethernet rj-45 on them, and whatever you plug into them joins a ~10Mb/s ethernet run over your home electrical wiring. My throughput tests show that its faster than my old 802.11b wireless network, slightly slower than my old HomePNA phoneline network, and much faster than my cable modems 3Mb/s down/256Kb/s up speed. Perfect.

Using these, I plugged my cable modem into one, then at the other end of the house I plugged my router into another, using the homeplug network as a bridge between the router and the cable modem. I was therefore able to co-locate the router and VOIP box near my pc's and my tivo, hard wiring them to the router. I was also close enough to a phone line to be able to route a 10' phone cable along the wall to a phone jack to make all the phone lines in the house "live" on the VOIP connection.

Problem solved, for ~$70 for the pair. Easy to install, no security problems, no configuration issues (you can put a unique password into all of your XE102's to make sure your network doesnt take a walk down the powerlines to a neighbors house and join with theirs...which CAN happen, at very low speeds...but putting in a unique password was very easy). Solid connection, doesnt "go away" for a while, and I still have my 802.11b connection for my laptop.

I ordered another pair so I can make every remote area in the house "live" on the network for cheap money. I'm going to get an ethernet "web camera" for our nursery in addition to the baby monitor, so I can "have a peek" from either of the pc's or the laptop, even if I'm sitting outside.

Its REALLY nice to have the flexibility to plug something into the network from anywhere theres an a/c outlet.

Do note that powerstrips, extension cords and surge protectors will reduce the network speed, and plugging the homeplug adapter into an outlet with some screaming devices like vacuum cleaners, hairdryers, microwave ovens and fluorescent lights can also reduce or stop the network when they're in operation. In some cases some reviewers have seen speed drop when plugging a homeplug into the same outlet as a vacuum cleaner that isnt even turned on. Moving the homeplug adapters to different outlets and measuring the speed with the included software utility helps you find the right place to put it. I have ALL of the above "problem" appliances in the house and got 10-11Mb/s speed from every outlet. So far I've never noticed a dropoff with fluorescent lights on, vacuum running and the microwave on. When I plugged the XE102 into a "good" surge protector, the speed dropped from 11Mb/s to 3-4Mb/s. One guy who wrote a review said he thought he could measure how "good" a surge protector would be by plugging a homeplug adapter into it and measuring the speed...the slower the speed, the "better" the isolation on the power strip. I dont know if thats true, but he claimed his "better" surge protection strips registered lower speeds than the cheap ones.

The only downside to using these is if you need more than the 4-5Mb/s of ACTUAL throughput (which is about all you get out of 802.11b, or 11g when you're more than 10' from the wireless router). Say you're transferring files, doing live high volume video transfers, or you have an internet connection thats more than 3-4Mb/s. Then you'll have to run wires.