200Mbs Network Through Your Mains Sockets

I'm one of the unfortunate people who is useless at D.I.Y. I'm also unfortunate because my ADSL line was installed in the most useless place in the house and I'm incapable of sorting it out. (think hallway, near none of the rooms where I use a computer).

Rather than rip up floors, drill holes, or trail CAT5 cables throughout the house, I decided to invest in WiFi gear. It's pretty good, I just keep my router/wifi bridge and NAS gear in a small cabinet near the ADSL point. Then, all my PCs etc are wi-fi enabled, so no wires needed.

However, sometimes the WiFi is a bit slow, and I was thinking that I'd like my office computers to at least be able to talk to each other very quickly, rather than having to bounce singals through the WiFi access point.

My first thought was to stick another hub in the office, and have all the computers wired through the hub in that room. That way they can all talk to each other quickly. However, they'd be iscolated from the WiFi network, so to get around this I could also plug a WiFi bridge into the hub to relay the signal from the main WiFi access point. Would this work? Can't see why not, but then 4 computers in my office would be sharing one 54Mbs WiFi link.

I was reading around, and stumbled upon an option I'd not considered. Basically, technology exists that allows you to use your mains electricity wiring for network traffic. This stuff isn't new, but it looks like the manufacturers have been busy and started to really make the technology usable. Apparently you can get a 200Mbs unit these days, which is fairly fantastico! Actually, these things only realistically transfer around 60Mbs, but this is still a tad faster than your average WiFi network according to some folk and a review!

If you ever trust Amazon.co.uk reviews, these products got 5 stars from all users!

In case you want to look further into these products, try googling for BPL or Broadband over Power Line products.

Netgear claim to have one that gives a whopping 200Mbs! I think I might have to invest, sounds great...