Add high speed Internet to any room without wires

Wifi problems? Are Power-Line Network Adapters the solution?
(check out the latest generation of Power-Line Network Adapters here):


ARCHIVE (old device): Product Review:

Panasonic's BL-PA100A HD-PLC Ethernet Adaptor

A no wire approach to adding high speed internet anywhere in homes or small businesses

Panasonic BL-PA100A power-line adapter

I bought a set of Panasonic's power-line network adapters to get a relatively high speed internet connection (up to 190 Mbps) to a location that was out of range of my wireless network. If you've never heard of power-line (or wire-line) ethernet adapters, these devices send ethernet signals over the electrical wiring in a home or business. While this sounds odd, it works really well. And since home wiring is connected to your neighborhood electrical grid manufacturers include security features to isolate your network traffic from your neighbors.

I could have bought hardware to extend the range of my WiFi network, but the price/performance of Panasonic's product made more sense. The plan was to add two Macs and a PC to my network. I've been burned setting up home networks before, so I was skeptical as to how easy this would be.

I decided to start with one of the Macs. Set-up was absolutely easy. It took maybe 15 minutes. The few necessary directions worked exactly as written. Even better, there was nothing to configure on the computer. The job consisted of plugging one unit (the master) into an AC receptacle near my router and running an ethernet cable between the unit and the router. The second unit (the slave) gets plugged into a receptacle near the computer you want on the network, and another ethernet cable goes between it and the computer. Amazingly, everything just worked.

To hook up all three computers, I unplugged the ethernet cable from the first Mac and plugged it into a Netgear 4 port dual speed ethernet hub. Then I ran three ethernet cables between the hub and each of the three computers. Once again it just worked.

I've been heavily using this configuration trouble free for about eight months. It's worked so well that last week, when I needed to move one of the Macs to a new location in my house, I bought another Panasonic adapter from Amazon. Adding this new slave adapter took 10 minutes and, as before, did not require any configuration changes to the Mac.

If I want to expand this set-up further I can add more slave adapters (up to 15). Obviously you'd need pretty fast Internet service for 15 computers to surf the net simultaneously. In my house my computers aren't all used at the same time, so things are generally pretty fast.

Regarding other reviews of this product that I've seen on Amazon.com, that are not are as glowing as mine: I found Panasonic's product highly reliable and easy to set up, I can guess what happened to some of these folks. First, while the adapters are relatively simple devices, they are electrical and are subject to damage, interference and misuse. If the adapters are damaged it should be fairly obvious because each unit has three colored lights to report various status and error conditions. I'll bet damaged units are pretty rare.

As for misuse, the instructions are clear and contain only a few steps, but must be followed exactly - including running a straight forward speed test that must pass before you plug the ethernet cable into your computer.

Interference is probably the biggest source of problems. Panasonic is quite specific about the potential for this sort of issue.

The adapters ideally must be plugged into an actual AC receptacle that is not shared by another device that could generate interference, like a power block for a low voltage device (i.e., laptops, printers, speakers, phones—almost everything, these days). Power blocks are really step-down transformers that produce electric fields that can disrupt power line network signals. Likewise, you should avoid plugging adapters into a power strip, which may contain circuitry that can create interference, or may have a power block or two plugged in.

Panasonic sells a high quality, well documented product that has worked well for me. Note that most of the technical points cited above will apply to any power-line networking product from any manufacturer.