Homeplug standard products offer — in theory — a very simple way indeed to add ethernet ports around your home or office wherever there's a power point.
I've been using home plug products from a variety of vendors for the best part of the last decade in preference to wireless. Wireless still has its place, but the nature of transmission means that it's almost always a highly variable signal. In my experience, homeplug is far more consistent, even if the early products only offered speeds of "up to" 12Mbps. So when Belkin announced 1000Mbps products, my curiosity was piqued.
The power line HD plugs replace the previous generation of 200Mbps AV products, and physically they're mostly similar. The pack comes with two hefty plug units that dominate any power socket they're plugged into. One annoying facet here is that the 200Mbps Powerline products were convertible — you could plug them in as big chunky single plugs, or slot in a small cable that made it easier to attach them where space was at a premium. No such joy with the 1000Mbps HD plugs. They're big chunky plugs only, and that means bodging it with double adaptors or resigning yourself to the fact that nothing is going to fit into the space next to the plug.
Homeplug products such as the power line HD are essentially binary. They either work or they don't. The very early home plugs had distinct problems if you shifted across power phases or put them on power boards. Phases shouldn't be a problem any more, but more complex powerboard setups may still baffle them, and the only way to be sure is to plug them in. One quick tip here: don't be too eager to tear the packaging apart. If it doesn't work with your wiring, a properly repacked box should be the easiest refund ever.
Setup of the 1000Mbps HD power line plugs was as simple as plugging them in and letting them sort out all the network sharing themselves. The core idea is that you plug one end in near your router, and then the other anywhere else you want ethernet connectivity. I tested for best possible speed by directly connecting up a 2006 Macbook and a 2009 iMac (both gigabit ethernet capable) and transferring a 577MB AVI file between them. Average transfer speed over a run of tests was 124.75Mbps. That's below the 1000Mbps stated speed, but most networks of this type rarely live up to the hype.
By way of contrast, plugging the older 200Mbps AV plus in and running the same tests gave an average of 56.9Mbps. If you do own the older 200Mbps plugs they are cross-compatible, but you'll take a solid performance hit. I averaged 43.1Mbps in mixed mode between a 200MBps AV plug and an 1000MBps HD plug. 124.75Mbps gives you a lot of potential room to shift files around the network. I was comfortably able to stream an HD .mkv movie trailer from one Mac to the other with no buffering at all, and there should still be space above that for other network tasks in a more complex environment.
The price of the power line HD kit is significant. For that kind of cash you could buy a quite decent wireless router. What you couldn't buy is much in the way of fixed wiring,and that's really what the power line HD kit is best compared to. There's no reason at all you couldn't hang it off a wireless router and have a best of both worlds setup.
If it's within your budget and you want a simple to install and easy to maintain networking solution anywhere that you've got a powerpoint, the Powerline HD plugs come highly recommended.
