Powerline adapters
 

Anyone have any experience with these?

My parents are about to get a new pc and they want to share the cable connection. the pc's are going to be in seperate rooms (rooms that are seperated by the living room).

so it would be nearly impossible to run a wire from room -> room.

wireless is an option, but we will need 2 cards and a wireless router.


so, i thought, why not try these powerline adapters i've been hearing about.

i'm currently looking at this Link 1 and Link 2

I was wondering if anyone had an experience with these things and how well these would work.

Thanks.

Here's a cool link I found while searching around for a networking solution for myself. It's a site called How Stuff Works, and it has a lot of very cool articles. The link I gave you should take you rght to their article on these powerline adapters, with their pros and cons, and a walkthrough on usage and installation.

Hope this helps.

I don't have them myself but I've read good things. Fred Langa, a writer for Information Week, said very positive things about them in his newsletter, LangaList. You can probably read an archive at www.langa.com.

Good luck!

I'm giving this a bump because I just bought a new computer, and moved the old one upstairs and across the house - so running a cable will be next to impossible, and this sounds a lot cheaper and more secure than wireless. I'd like to hear of some more experiences with this before buying it, though.

As far as costs go, though - unless the cost is for a kit - don't you need one for each PC, and one for the modem? If so - just to connect 2 PCs would cost about $120 - $150, right?

which is about the same of having to buy the wireless cards and routers...

Right - but in the How Stuff Works link, the writer says he hooked up 2 PCs for $50 (Of course - that was the old Intelogis PassPort system). Doesn't make sense. If you bought 2 adaptors, would the remote PC be able to use the modem thru the connected PC? Or does the modem require its own adaptor?

Powerline networking is evil. I just don't understand why folks look at it as being all that much cheaper....

You can buy perfectly good 802.11b routers and network cards as a kit from places like Best Buy or newegg.com for about the same price as powerline networking. To me, powerline networking is just introducing more problems than it is worth. Power cabling, lack of surge protection .... bleck!

There are few people that have the know-how, much less the desire to crack in past 128-bit encryption on a wireless-B network when a perfectly good, unsecure network is only another house down the block. Its just not worth the time to crack into it.

That is a poor excuse to cast aside 802.11b as a networking standard.

Your cable modem would be connected to the server PC via USB or ethernet cabling, and the server PC would, in turn, deliver Internet* through the powerline network. The server PC would need to be on in order for this to work. There are powerline routers that connect cable modems onto the powerline network, but if you're going to go that way... then I *REALLY* don't understand why you wouldn't just use 802.11b.

* Via Windows internet connection sharing option. Turn off Windows, and you lose your networked Internet connection.