HomePlug PowerLine PL-85PE 85Mbps Ethernet Adapter
HomePlug PowerLine PL-85PE 85Mbps Ethernet Adapter:
Do you own a really big house?? No, me neither … OK, so do you own or live in a 1950’s council house that seems to have unfeasably dense walls that mean from one room to the next your full power 802.11G wifi network is down to 20% 2 rooms away from the base station? Ahhhh, now we’re talking.
I’m running an Airport Extreme basestation capable of transmiting 802.11N and the one thing in my house that’s capable of using it is my AppleTV. Unfortunatly unless the planets are in some particularly strange alignment we always seem to suffer from breakup or stuttering when watching programs on it. This is particularly annouing when you realise that I’ve spent quite a lot of time ripping my entire (OK, so I’m still working on it) DVD collection into iTunes and have at my disposal just inder 1.5TB of films and TV to watch on it.
Enter the HomePlug PowerLine series of gadgets. Now I know broadband over powerlines has been promised for many years and seems to have spectacularly failed to deliver, but using these devices as a localised for of that seems to work really nicely!
You simply plug one of them in near your network and connect it with a standard ethernet cable. Then you plug a second device in right over the other side of your house and take the network back out of it using another standard ethernet cable … magic!
The blurb that comes with the devices and on the website claims that it also encrypts your network just so that your neibhors can’t access it, but I think I’ll be locking mine down by MAC address or something similar in the next day or so, just to be sure.
Other than that the results were perfect. I’ve been flicking around on AppleTV like a madman earlier today without even a hint of skipping … w00t!
