Adam Bower wrote:
I'd like to know where you can buy powerline adaptors for the same price as wireless cards? I'd quite like some to get all the kit I have that doesn't move around onto something faster.
It depends what you pay for the wireless kit, I guess. The prices are comparable in my experience. The Solwise stuff is amongst the cheapest (and as I mentioned elsewhere gets above average ratings). As a reseller I'd best not suggest any vendors other than www.solwise.co.uk themselves, but you can usually get them slightly cheaper elsewhere.
Also, what kind of performance do people see with this powerline gear as in latency and speed? I've read reports of it being about as slow as wireless.
A perfect wireless network will beat a homeplug network with noise issues, but in our experience with both the performance of 11Mbps homeplug has been broadly similar to 54MBps wireless, and 85MBps exceeding it. Homeplug numbers are optimistic best cases (the same as wireless) but most users get much closer to best case with homeplug than wireless. All anecdotal, of-course.
Also there are 2 reasons that it is not as popular as wireless, first off some people have problems with powerline not working for them so they are in the same boat as wireless.
Most people (in our experience) come to homeplug because wireless failed them; it's rare for someone to start with homeplug. That makes it hard to compare properly.
Also powerline doesn't help me with my laptop which I move around the house, and most people have a wireless network as most laptops have wireless adaptors built in, but i'm not aware of anyone offering powerline stuff built into machines (although, if you could buy psu's and laptop adaptors that had it built in that'd be neat).
It would be good if the technology could be built into PSUs etc, but I don't know anyone doing it. It would be nice if the homeplugs at least had a mains passthrough so that they didn't take up a socket on their own, but again I don't know of any that do. And they tend to be a bit on the large side in many cases, so might prevent an adjacent socket being used (newer units are smaller though).
Regarding wireless, there are homeplug wireless devices that combine the two; you put your network onto the mains at (say) the ADSL router, then plug the wireless homeplug adapter into the mains somewhere convenient based on where wireless networking will be used. I set this up for my Dad for his birthday and it works well, whereas a wireless signal from the router down to the kitchen where he sits with the laptop was not workable (he plugs the wireless homeplug into a socket in the kitchen).
Homeplugs aren't the total panacea they're sometimes claimed to be, but we find that they come closer than wireless does for most people. And they're MUCH more secure for most on-technical users.