Power Line Ethernet: Delivered On Promise

Last week I cried out loud my 802.11n hassles. People may wonder why move to faster wireless network at home, but the answer seems to be pretty clear: multimedia. More and more homes are equipped with some kind of a multimedia home server. In my case this is the Infrant / Netgear ReadyNAS NV+. It serves three main purposes:

• Stores my digital pictures (the ones myself and other members of the family snap with our cameras)
• Stores digital videos (mostly satellite TV recordings I collect, like the Formula-1 races)
• Stores digital music (MP3 rips of CDs I buy and eMusic downloads)

All the three types of content go through my laptop. Pictures are copied from memory cards to the laptop, cataloged with Picasa and sent to the NAS. Videos are downloaded from the hard drive of the Dreambox satellite tuner, and then converted from .TS (MPEG-2 satellite transport stream format) to .MPG (MPEG-2 native format) and sent to the NAS. Music goes almost the same way. Each time the laptop does some processing, and then sends the files to the NAS server. Typical payload is several gigabytes. For example vacations pictures collection was about 3GB and typical Formula-1 event (2-hours race) is 5GB. It just takes too long to transfer over 802.11b or 802.11g. Surely I could plug a 100Mbps cable, but I almost always do these things on a sofa with no cables at all. That is the process of storing the content.

And next is the playback process. The most often used playback set consists of the HD Projector and Sony PlayStation 3. PlayStation really excels as a multimedia playback device. Thanks to the DLNA it automatically discovers the ReadyNAS and allows browsing the content (be it photos or videos or music). I love the slide shows. They are so dynamic and pleasure to watch. PlayStation has several playback modes, some with artistic "touch", other dynamically zooming on people's faces. Viewing digital pictures this way is a completely new experience. A reason by itself to snap as many photos as you can. The PlayStation has built-in WiFi, but the WiFi is probably the weakest part of the equation. It is just too slow for slide shows. They are much smoother when running over wired Ethernet. And it is barely enough for video playback. In both cases a wired network is needed for full glory.

But what can you do, when you do not have CAT-5 wires close to your TV and WiFi is not a solution? Try the Ethernet over power line, in it's HomePlugAV incarnation. A while ago I wrote on the Linksys PLE200 adapter. It works without a glitch. But you can plug only one RJ-45 cable to it. And I also needed a second one for the n-TV set top box and a WiFi extender for web browsing. The ZyXEL NBG-318S seemed to be the right fit.

NBG-318S is a three-in-one connectivity solution:

• It is a firewall / router (the router / NAT functionality may be disabled and then it is just a switch / access point).
• It is a HomePlugAV endpoint - on of the switch ports is wired directly to the power line interface.
• It is a standard (802.11b/g) access point

After bad experience with some complex devices I was a little afraid if the ZyXEL would perform up to its promise, but after spending some time with it I can fully recommend it. It just works flawlessly and the management interface is very clean, while still having a professional look and feel. In real life I have been able to achieve speeds between 80Mbps and 150Mbps over power line. Ah and on the other end of the line there was the Linksys PLE200, so yes, the HomePlugAV is really an interoperable standard. It may take some effort to set it up on the Linksys side, and I will post a step-by-step guide on the Tech Bulletins blog soon.