Netgear delivers 85 Mbps over power lines

IT'S HARD not to love powerline technology (PLT), except for the price tag. You plug it into the wall socket, plug in your Ethernet connection, and it just works, using the home's electrical wiring to move around data. There's no fussing around with antennae, worrying about your neighbours poaching on your Wi-Fi router or someone driving around with a cantenna trying to crack your network.

NetGear has upped PLT speeds to 85 Mbps with the XE104 wall-plugged 4-port Ethernet switch. It incorporates Intellon's INT 5500CS chipset to boost speeds in a non-standardized fashion; HomePlug 1.0 is good up to 14 Mbps while next-generation HomePlugAV will go up to 200 Mbps to support HDTV, video-on-demand. Initial HomePlugAV devices were "expected" during the second quarter of 2006, but there haven't been any press releases on the subject since devolo's announcement at CeBIT that they're going to use Intellion's HomePlugAV chipset. Instead, many vendors, including DLink and devolo, have latched onto Intelleon's 85 Mbps solution as an intermediate solution until HomePlug AV chip sets start turning up in affordable quantities.

Installing the XE104s - you need at least two to take advantage of the 85 Mbps data rates - is simple. Rip open the box, plug into the wall, plug Ethernet cable into one of the available 10/100 Ethernet ports (two per side), and then watch the blinky lights if you need to trouble-shoot any network problems. They'll even work plugged in upside down; a necessary feature given the space-hog ways of powerstrips and UPSes. If you want to get really fancy, you can use the supplied CD to change the default passwords to something more unique. If you are in a shared dwelling, such as an apartment complex, you may want to do this for some additional security. Alternately, you can set up different logical workgroups on the same "house wiring" with different passwords.

One of the nice features of the XE104 is that they're backwards compatible with HomePlug 1.0, so you can mix and match devices if you need. The XE104 worked fine with the IOGear HomePlug devices I had already operating on my network. Having four 10/100 Ethernet ports even though you don't get 100 Mbps Ethernet speeds is also very useful in a SOHO environment. For example, I can have both my desktop and laptop computers plugged into the bridge so I can cut down on the amount of Wi-Fi traffic and 2.4GHz noise.

Price is going to hold some people back. A pair of first generation 14 Mbps HomePlug devices cost around $71.00 (down from the $129.00 list on Amazon.com). A pair of the XE104 units list price $199.00 at the local Big Box. Of course, if you want to go over 100 Mbps with Wi-Fi, you're likely to end up shelling out a larger sum of money, especially if you start factoring in the cost of individual Wi-Fi frobs when compared to plugging things into the PLT bridge. Finally, if you are really future-proof paranoid, you're going to have to sit on your hands until the end of the year when HomePlugAV units start showing up in quantity. ?