Just about a week ago my wife informed me that she wasn’t happy about having WiFi in the house. We’d been using WiFi for the last few years, and we both use laptops around the home so it was a handy thing to have.
Having said that, WiFi did have a few problems. The router was upstairs and signal strength in our living room was not great. In other rooms in the house it was virtually non-existant. Out in the garden I could pick up a signal close to the house, but if I wanted to sit out in the middle of the lawn with my laptop on a nice summer’s evening then I’d struggle to get any kind of a signal.
I had been thinking about Homeplug technology for quite a while, so this announcement from Linda that WiFi was now “Technology Non-Grata” prompted me to look into it seriously.
I have a mixed environment of machines here. A Mac Mini (running Tiger), a MacBook Pro (running Leopard), an old Dell Laptop (Windows XP Pro) and a home brewed “PC” (Mandriva Linux). I needed something that would work on just about any operating system you could throw at it.
Normally I would hunt around online for a while before taking the plunge, but on this occasion I just took a trip down to my nearest PC World outlet to choose from what they had there.
I ended up choosing the Devolo dLAN Ethernet Highspeed 85 adapters. They support Windows, Linux and Mac, have security built in and the quoted maximum throughput of 85 mega-bits per second sounded adequate as a WiFi replacement. There are 200 mega-bit per second units available, but at a price premium.
Talking of price, these things set me back £39.99 per unit – so not exactly cheap.
Installation was a breeze, though a note for Mac owners – go download the latest software from the Devolo web site before trying to set this up. I had no luck using the software supplied on CD with the unit, maybe due to my running Leopard (the latest version at time of writing is dated October 1st 2007, so that could well have been the problem).
You just plug the unit into the mains near where you want to use your computer, connect your ethernet cable to the adapter, plug the other end into your computer – and away you go.
The supplied (or downloaded!) software is only required for setting up the security on the adapters, although I notice that for Windows users there are some extra tools – none of them are really necessary. It does appear that firmware upgrades have to be applied via Windows, I could only see a Windows executable for performing this task, but I haven’t attempted to upgrade the firmware yet as it all seems to be running fine as it is (if it ain’t broke…).
No device specific drivers are required, so once you have any security set on your adapter, you’re away. It’s just standard ethernet from the computer to the adapter. The encryption is applied within the adapter. I have heard that it’s possible to pop into a neighbours house (or I guess any house up to 200 meters away) and pick up a signal if they’re on the same circuit as you. Now, I don’t really understand electricity, and I have yet to try this, however setting up encryption on the devices seemed like a good idea to me.
So, I now have one of these Devolo adapters connected to my ADSL router, and others wherever I want to connect a PC to the network. The adapters are small and light enough to just pop into my laptop case when I’m not using it. That way if I decide to use the laptop anywhere in the house, I have my adapter with me. They claim to have a range of up to 200 meters over power lines, which is actually twice that of standard CAT 5 cabling. I have yet to test this out in the garden, it being January and typically wet and cold here in Leicester.
Performance seems good, certainly better than WiFi and all in all I’m happy with the change. I always used to find signal dropouts using WiFi frustrating and I just don’t have to think about that any more. Okay, so I have to plug in an ethernet cable to my laptop when I want a connection, but that isn’t really any big deal.
I guess I’m bucking the trend in Apple’s eyes; they have after all just released their brand new MacBook Air – a computer designed to work in total harmony with WiFi. Heck you’re even supposed to upgrade or reinstall OS X (should you need to) using an optical drive located in another computer over WiFi with that thing.
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