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IOGEAR Homeplug Networking Reviewed
Chris Allen writes "Wired or wireless? This is always just about the first thing anyone thinks of when planning their new home/soho office. It always comes down to price/performance/practicality, in whichever order you feel is more important. Sometimes it just isn't possible to run CAT5, for a variety of reasons. The only options available for the average consumer is wireless, HomePNA, which uses your existing telephone network in your house, and HomePlug, using your existing power grid. HomePNA has been around for around 3 years or so, and has matured some, starting out transmitting at dismal speeds and lackluster reliability in regards to interference. HomePlug is short for HomePlug® Powerline Alliance."
Gee first comment, and it wont be off or on topic, just an interesting side note...
Anyways there's an interesting side note to the history of the ricochet modem. It's parent company developed and deployed a network over powerline technology for some LA based power company years ago. Too bad they went bankrupt otherwise i'd have a link.
On an ongoing basis you can expect maybe 5-8Mbps from HomePlug. The newer HomePNA hardware is faster (steady 10Mbps) and works well. If you're basically using it to share an Internet connection, both are fine of course.
Also, make sure to set the password on your HomePlug hardware or everone on your street up to the transformer is on your LAN.
Will this work as good? ;)
How about power spikes? I live in a neighborhood that is on the top end of what voltages are tolerable, so the quick, small, and frequent power spikes are more noticable and damaging and burn up lightbulbs frequently. If I were using this wouldn't I have to worry about it burning up the modem every couple of months?
I assume putting it behind some sort of surge supressor to protect it from the spikes would ruin it's ability to communite on the power lines.
Shoot Pixels, Not People!
Most people are going to go for Wireless, its simpler to install, you can move around, don't need new sockets for new devices, and every network should have a wireless element in it.
BUT if you are connecting key elements together, like a primary desktop, a server or even just the major working at home point (in front of the TV with the laptop on my lap) then wired rules the world. Why ? Well apart from being able to transfer things around the network quicker, no drop in quality if the next door neighbour sets up their own wireless LAN with the packet clash party that can grow into. There is one bigger advantage to wires (no not security as you do need wireless to work in the garden).
Wires are maintainance free, they won't require upgrading as broadband gets broader. Legacy kit comes with the connections built in.
Wires for infrastructure and key sections. Wireless for roaming.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Which the two "home" brand solutions do stop you needing wires all through the building, it's worth noting that you do have to have another wire going to a power socket or a local phone socket.
There's only phone sockets downstairs at my place, so HomePNA might as well be a slow CAT5. HomePlug would be more useful but how well does that work when plugged into a couple of extension cables and a 10-way multiplug? Would this affect speed or stop it entirely?
Incidentally in my case it is just for internet connection sharing so I use as cheap an 802.11 as worked.
What about when you get GBit to the door over fiber.
You'll have to upgrade the wires at sometime in the next 50 years I expect, though it shouldn't be too much hastle and should always be quicker than anything else (unless you're using wormholes)
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
...just use the old TV aerial wiring.
We got cable a couple of years ago, which left all our old TV aerial wiring totally unused. This was great, because we needed a network cable running from a room downstairs with a TV aerial socket to a room upstairs. I found the other end of the aerial cable, poked a hole through the loft, and brought the cable down. Then it was just a matter of putting a BNC end on that cable, and changing the wall socket downstairs to a BNC socket. Hey presto - a nice, simple solution using existing wiring and technology! Who'd have thought it?
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
On one of the foldout diagrams that comes with the HomePlug hardware, it makes the following claim: "By offering 56-bit DES encryption, HomePlug is also much more secure than other home networking technologies such as wireless ethernet." Yeah, right.
What do you mean, are you actually using felines for networking? What do you do, duct tape a floppy or CD (For higher bandwith) to the cat, then throw catnip on the destination station?!?!?!
Oh...sorry, that was CAT5...
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
The characteristic impedance of TV co-ax is 75 ohms. Thinnet Ethernet cable is 50 ohms, as is the impedance of an Ethernet card. This will cause a VSWR mismatch.
You are getting a reflected signal off each network card in the system. As you describe it, you have a simple point-to-point link, so your reflections are "only" bouncing from one card to another. This will cause errors in the system.
I would suggest that you get REAL network cable (preferably CAT-5), tie it onto the existing cable, and pull it through. You will then be able to run 100Mbit, you won't have the reflection problem, and I think you will be much happier overall.
(actually, I would suggest that you go to the local hardware store, and while you are picking up the CAT5, pick up a spool of nylon cordage. Strip the end of the coax, and securely tie the cordage to the shield of the coax. Then smoothly tape it over with electrician's tape, starting on the coax jacket and with a 1/3 overlap moving to the cordage. When you reach the cordage, wind one extra pass, then cut the tape and UNWIND and REWIND that last wrap with no tension on the tape. Then pull the cordage through. Once it is through, then tie the CAT5 to the cordage and tape as you did the coax. Then pull BOTH the CAT5 and a new run of cordage. Leave the cordage in place - it will save you grief later if you need to pull an additional cable.)
www.eFax.com are spammers
Last year I talked to a couple of powerline networking and bluetooth manufacturing firms at CeBIT 2002 in Hannover, Germany. I was trying to get an idea of what future products they were working on, because I think both technologies would work well with each other.
What I would like to see is a bluetooth adapter that plugs into the wall socket to provide powerline network access to my home server to any bluetooth enabled device in the room. I should provide a straight through plug so I could still plug, say, a lamp into the socket. PDAs and TabletPCs could access the server through this bluetooth/powerline network, so for example, my PDA could automatically sync with my server when I walked into the house or into my home office. This set up might even be more secure due to the shorter range of bluetooth devices as compared to 802.11 wireless.
The powerline network would also help other technologies get a foothold. For example, I can see synergies in my refrigerator and pantry being intelligent enough to sense intelligent packaging and to be able tell how well stocked they were. (I don't want an Internet-enabled refrigerator though. That is like begging for trouble.) Using powerline networking, I could connect the 'frig to my server (hey, it has to be plugged in anyway!) and software on my server could combine the data from both refrigerator and pantry inventories to develop a shopping list transmitted/updated to my PDA automatically.
Personally, I think the Open Source community should jump on the home server bandwagon soon, and start providing a client/server API and applications that can be used by smart devices to connect via wireless/bluetooth/pwoerline networking to home servers. That is the future. Fighting the battle of the desktop is only of limited future use. The real battle, and the one that Linux and open source can win, is home servers that provide stable support to the intelligent devices finding their way into our homes and offices.
Bureaucracy loves company.
What security do these devices have to prevent the neighbor from eavesdropping on your powerline LAN? The power lines don't stop at the walls of your house?
Is there some sort of device you can put in at your fuse box to block data going in/out? What are the practical restrictions on someone coming up and using an external outlet at your house (none that I can see)?
This may be somewhat convenient for some applications, and perhaps more secure than wireless, but there are still some physical security issues that seem harder to address than with CAT5.
Throw in the lower level of convenience than one gets with wireless as well as a much lower rate of throughput than with 802.11a, and I don't see much more than a niche market for this sort of product.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
How do you connect the phone reciever end to the PC?
Or am i entirely up the wrong tree as to how this works?
Anyone know if Linux supports these devices? Does the USB variety just look like a regular old Communications Class USB device?
Picture the scene, its the mid-80s. Apple engineers want a way to network their dinky 9" screen toaster macs. All they have is a serial port, and almost no one has heard of Ethernet.
More importantly, the wife (landlord or whoever) is not going to stand for rewiring the house with some computer nonsense.
Solution: AppleTalk networking over LocalTalk cabling. ie, use the existing phone sockets and cabling to send data. By modern standards it crawls, but it works well and is still in use today (by some unfortunate souls).
Almost 20 years later you have HomePNA. There aren't many new ideas in this world.
Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls
A little bigger on the inside than out
could all you Slashdotters *please* hammer Broadcom to improve the openness of documentation/support
Dear Broadcom,
Until such a time as you comply with our documentation/support demands, we will be linking slashdot articles to your primary servers on a daily basis.
Something like that what you're asking for?
(I hope nobody else posted this...)
The post mentions a home/soho office. So let's expand the abbreviations out - we're looking at solutions for a home/[small office/home office] office, which means this is for either a home office, a small office office, or a home office office. Wouldn't "soho" have been enough? That's the point of abbreviations! don't surround an abbreviation with filler words! Aaah!
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
I looked at some of the homeplug.org web sites and member sites like Asoka.
Homeplug runs natively at 14Mbps (USB devices are limited to USB's 12 Mbps speed), though effective speeds are often lower, depending on how noisy your environment is (one site said 80% of their tests got 5Mbps or better), and it's good for up to 1km, as long as there aren't power transformers in the way. You can only put 16 devices on the network; I assume that's 16 devices per 56-bit-DES security key, but I could be wrong. That does mean that you're not going to wire everybody in your neighborhood together in the same LAN. Nothing I saw talked about the throughput effects of having your neighbors sharing the network, only the security effects.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
One problem with running cable in some places is when the building is old and Heritage listed (or covered by some protection scheme). When you aren't allowed to put holes in the walls, dig up the floors, cut through the ceilings, or even as much as scratch the paint, you have to look at using things like HomePlug, HomePNA or Wireless.
I know a number of Catholic (and other) schools that have deployed HomePNA and/or Wireless so they can use computers in such buildings. Some of the buildings don't even have normal phone lines in them, and instead they use VoIP phones hanging off a Wireless Ethernet Bridge.