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I have written in the past about the NetGear Powerline products. They turn your house electrical wiring into Ethernet wiring. You plug a Netgear XE103 into an electric outlet and plug an Ethernet cable from it to your router. You have now established the sending side of the equation. On the other end you need to have something to receive the Ethernet signal. The XE104 adapter plugs into a wall outlet somewhere in your home and it adds 4 Ethernet ports to your network. We all know that as wonderful as wireless Ethernet may be, there are always dreaded dead zones where for some reason wireless just doesn’t work. Usually those dead zones are areas where physically cabling for networks is darn near impossible or improbably expensive. NetGear’s Powerline products can meet that need. I particularly find the XE104 attractive as it adds 4 ports not just one. I have routers all over the house and the ability to add 4 more ports easily is highly appealing.

Home networking can be a pain. Wireless is wonderful when it works. Hardwired networks always work faster but sometimes getting from point A to point B involves running wires through the shower or up the chimney. Face it, most of our homes were not built for ease of wiring post construction. I have had mixed results with wireless, my present Linksys wireless router works well with my Trendnet USB wireless NIC and my built in wirele ss in my PDA and my laptop. I get less than stellar results at my son’s home with the same equipment. Woe is me, what to do, what to do? Networking through the electrical outlets is finally coming of age. Not only does it work, it works well. It wasn’t that long ago that we first tested this technology, back when I still owned a computer business. It was so so. Now with the advances here and those coming soon we are looking at 200 Mbps throughput now and 400 Mbps throughput in the next year. Very respectable, quicker than wireless and theoretically with freq...