Interviews - HEXUS.TalkingShop: the year of powerline networking?

[HEXUS]

We spoke to powerline networking specialist Devolo about the opportunities created by Internet TV.

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[cheesemp]

Its a great idea as long as you don't have two separate circuits in your house. My house was two flats for a while and each floor therefore has its own consumer unit and therefore these won't work. Got round the problem by using good old plain ethernet cable! Worth borrowing a set to test before buying!

[Stefan_C]

Saved me having to buy a proprietary wireless dongle for the tv in my bedroom and an expensive wireless adapter for my xbox

[Shooty*]

Just had house rebuilt, and cat6 built in. Therefore have 3 network plugs up for sale shortly. Should help pay for a switch

[Georgy291]

shooty, pm me about those plugs, already interested

[crossy]

I like this gear - got six of the fancy "AVsmart+" boxes in the house and they're a real fire-and-forget solution to wireless problems. I actually migrated from equivalent boxes from Solwise because those ones weren't - ahem - the most reliable. The Devolo's on the other hand, are rock solid, and run very cool to boot. The pass-through socket is great for the AV gear - TV and BluRay are plugged into a unit each both for power and network.

Interesting about the new "500Mb/s" units - especially as the Devolo websites don't seem to carry any details, (I just checked). Shame that the one shown doesn't have a pass-through socket - that's a "fail" in my book because I can't afford to lose a socket or two (these can be quite large). That said, if those nice folks at Devolo (hint, hint, hint, ...) were to offer a limited time trade-in deal for the 200Mb/s units then I'd probably sign up.

While I'm thinking of "stuff that would be nice to see" a decent router with this built in would be nice. Yes, I know there are such units available from other manufacturers, but they seem to be mostly the older (slower!) standards.

Nice article Scott! One comment though - there's no point you "borrowing" a single plug to try it out - you need a minimum of two!

I can't see the radio "hams" being happy about the prospect of more PLE kit being bought - last time I heard there were screams from that community about intolerable wavelength pollution from just the limited amount of gear out there at the moment. The technical argument for/against this goes right over my head.

[Scott B]

Nice article Scott! One comment though - there's no point you "borrowing" a single plug to try it out - you need a minimum of two!

Ah, that explains it.

[Arthran]

I bought a pair of adapters for my last house, to run from upstairs to down, couldn't fault them. Using them in the new house to save ugly wires. wish i had more of them though!

[ZeroZero7]

We all would be very excited that very soon some day, we could fully utilized the existing powerline to transfer data & video effortlessly, without any lagging, jittering and buffering (no new Cat5 or Cat6 cables running across our house and hacking needed). We all will be able to play smooth gaming on Xbox 360, PS3 & stream full HD on our large LCD or Plasma TV via powerline. Fyi...I have visited the forum at hardware zone and found some interesting links and comments on the higher performance plc adapters ie the 1000Mbps (Gigabit adapters from Aztech). So you can see, the higher performance greater than 500Mbps may not equate to higher performance in throughput. Make sure you have the 30 days refund policy. If the plc adapters do not meet your expectation, then you would be able to return it for full refund. Be a street wise and smart consumer Cheers!