Linksys PLE200 PowerLine AV Ethernet Adapter

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a LAN (Local Area Network) connection wherever there are power sockets around the house? Most of today's "connected" gear is mains - powered. A plug in a socket on a wall. Nowadays Ethernet should be there as well... But unfortunately there is not... How many times have I had a need to connect a device to the home network and simply there was no network socket around...

Of course there is WiFi (Wireless Ethernet). But there are several cons of using wireless...

• WiFi is hackable. Last week during a lazy day I was browsing logs on my home router (the DFL-800 by DLink, highly recommended) and I discovered there was a "guest" MAC address hanging around... Something pretty unusual, as I was using WPA security settings. It took me a while to get rid of the "guest", and to increase security I moved the bar up a notch to the WPA2 level. Since then my Vista X61 WiFi card is losing connection once - twice a day and Windows reports the card has to be reset. After the reset everything comes back to normal, but you see the point:
• WiFi generally is unstable. Not very unstable, but just unstable enough to annoy from time to time.
• WiFi is slow. Yes, it is more than enough to read email and surf the Web and watch YouTube. But try to do a few large file transfers, like moving your library of digital media - pictures, music, videos to a server on your local network. It will take ages over WiFi, especially when you just drag and drop the files between two Windows folders. The protocol working below such a file transfer is synchronous (a lot of handshaking) and simply the little delays on the radio channel (usually undetectable under normal conditions), can effectively bog down the transfer process.
• Game consoles have either poor (Sony PS3) or non existent (XBOX) WiFi. BTW this is insane. The strength of today's gaming consoles lies in connectivity to the Internet and two most powerful boxes just do not have it right. XBOX lacks wireless at all and PlayStation3 has very weak radio and antennas... Poor link performance and poor range. Sony should definitely improve this as this seems to be the only thing I am not fully happy about :).

So here comes the HomePlugAV to the rescue. To quote Wikipedia:

The HomePlug AV standard was designed to provide sufficient bandwidth for applications such as HDTV and VoIP. Utilizing adaptive modulation on up to 1155 OFDM sub-carriers, turbo convolution codes for error correction, two-level MAC framing with ARQ,[2] and other techniques, HomePlug AV can achieve near the theoretical maximum bandwidth across a given transmission path.[1] Key distribution techniques and the use of 128 bit AES encryption are specified as mandatory in the standard. Furthermore, even the interception of data exchanged between HomePlug AV devices poses a "significant challenge" for an attacker due to the adaptive techniques used to modulate the signal between two given points.

The above just means 100Mb Ethernet in every power socket. The only thing you need for that is a HomePlug AV compatible adapter. I grabbed a few recently - the Linksys PLE200 series, around $50 a piece. Fully plug and play - Ethernet on one end and power socket on the other. If you want to set up encryption, you have to use the supplied application to enter appropriate passwords. Otherwise they just work. I tested them with the PlayStation 3 and the difference, compared to WiFi is clearly visible. Pictures slideshow performance is vastly improved - faster loading and more dynamic animations in the "Portrait" mode. And faster startup of movies played off of the DLNA server. Recommended!