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
No comments:
Post a Comment