The other day I had a dilemma, after building my garden office I was wondering how to get a network connection down there. The company had put a cat 5 cable down for the phones, so I tried to adapt that for use with UTP. Hmm unfortunately my networking skills have become rusty over time. Now I had tried with the wireless, but unless I wanted to work at the edge of my open office door I think I might be out of luck
So I had a panic… omg I’ve spent muchos poundos on a useless play room for my daughter
Well useless for me …… where can I play games now?
Well trying not to accept the inevitable I logged onto WOW, no honestly I wasn’t looking to try and ignore my problems by playing games…. !! I asked around there whilst killing mobs (you do know these MMO’s are just overblown MSN don’t you?) and one guy came up with the idea to use these HomePLug or Powerline adapters.
Now these work by passing the signal over your existing house electrical wiring, some sort of magic ;). I was initially skeptical about whether this worked and did a bit of searching around on the interweb
Eventually I settled on the Netgear HDXB101 which is an AV system.
NetGear HBXB101 Page
I didn’t know anyone to borrow the system off of so I had to take the £120 punt on buying it. It was expensive but I had read some good reviews of other people in similar situations to me, i.e. garden office on a separate wiring system, having good results so I decided that it was what I needed and hey one day I might pipe some HDTV down there
HDXB101 is a kit system, it comes with two adapters which plug directly into the wall (they recommend direct plugging) and each has an Ethernet port on the side. It also comes with two Ethernet cables so you don’t even have to have any of those.
When it arrived I skeptically plugged it into the wall in the house and fed the supplied UTP cable from the wireless router. It has three lights on it, power, link and Ethernet. The power and Ethernet lights were lit up on this unit, the magic blue middle light would only light up hopefully when I plugged in the next unit in the office. Eagerly I took the other unit down the garden to the office and holding my breath plugged it in.
Initially nothing happened, I didn’t know what to expect, with only the powerlight coming on. I waited a few minutes not knowing whether the electrics in the house or the new shed (it’s has it’s own consumer unit) would be good enough to route the signal (after my catv failings I wasn’t too hopeful). Then the blue light magically came alight. Wow I thought this is great. Plugging in the second utp cable and connecting up to my laptop, I waited to see if it managed to be able to get an IP connection, within a few moments it did and I was up and running.
I haven’t done much testing about the speeds of the network and whether it works for HD, but I’m just amazed at it working at all. More tests will have to be done and the system will need to be secured, aparently you can have up to 16 of these on a single wiring system I can imagine that in flats it might be a problem.
Now when I get some blinds I can then move my office finally down to the end of the garden from the living room 