I am very lucky in as much as I have a organery office where I do most of my work on sites and also client work. The office is about 5 meters from the house and about 20 meters from the router through which I get my broadband.
For the last few years I have been using a wireless extender to throw the signal out to the "clubhouse" with varying degrees of success. The worst of it is that it was very patchy. Sometimes I would get overwhelming signal and others it would drop out completely.
A few weeks ago a colleague at my current client offered to lend me some 85mbs powerline adapters he had to see if they would be of any use to me. Well I jumped at the opening and brought the adapters home.
The units he loaned me were 2 Devolo dlan adapters and one Netgear Xe-104 adapter. As soon as I got home I installed the one adapter in the room with the router and related the Ethernet to the adapter. I then took the second adapter out to the club house and fire up the pc.
Immediately the pc related through on its internal card and we were on the Internet. It worked and I immediately made an offer to take the units of his hands (they were gathering dust in a drawer as he had upgraded to 200mbs kit).
Over the next few days I tried varied configurations and didn't have any problems. This included putting the adapters into extension leads as well connecting other machines to the network. All in all a huge success.
Having now come to be a perfect change to the power of powerline networks I decided to buy a join more and purchased a Solwise 200 Mbps Net-Pl-200Av-Piggy and a Solwise 200Mbps Home Plug Av Ethernet Adaptor with 11n WiFi & 2 Ethernet Ports. Again I immediately installed these in the house and clubhouse. They seemed to work initially and I was happy.
The following day I went out to the clubhouse and discovered that the powerline network was down. I restarted it and all was Ok. The next day the same thing happened, not good. In contacting the provider they informed me that the 200mbs units can be very susceptible to noise on the circuit.
With that in mind I changed the configuration of the network to have the 85mbs between the house and the clubhouse and the 200mbs internally. Since then the 200mbs units have been up every day without an issue and my son is over the moon with the extras speed on his Xbox live subscription!!
So in overview the poweline units are exquisite and the technology works out of the box. I now have 3 networks ready wireless, 85mbs powerline and 200mbs powerline. Once the 1gb powerlines are more cheap I will look at investing in them.
As with every technology as it matures it becomes more stable and easier to use. This is an example of out the box and in use straight away.
Powerline Networking impart and touch of the Technology