Ah yes! Our second male contributor on BitchBuzz! Please welcome Iain Buchanan, BitchBuzz's cofounder, resident developer and all-around Techie...
Having lived in rented apartments for the last few years, a challenge I've always find myself facing is setting up a home office. Wireless is great for laptops and occasional use, but when you're dealing with a desktop PC (or two) and shared printers, well, that's another story.
The other problem I've found is getting online. For some reason, every apartment I've ever lived in, has the broadband socket in some obscure place like next to the front door, or behind the the TV. Not a problem if you're in the Secret Service and need a quick exit or you like your TV and Computer lined up like an Internet Café.
And this is where powerline networking enters the picture. Powerline essentially turns every power socket in your apartment into a potential network socket or internet connection. Powerline is nothing new, although as broadband speeds are getting increasingly faster, so are the speeds achievable through Powerline.
I've had the chance to try out the Belkin AV Starter kit and so far am pretty impressed. The starter kit comes with 2 adapters, which is enough to connect up two rooms and at 200mb/s is almost four times as fast as you'll get from wireless.
The included adapters are designed to be plugged straight into the wall, but are slightly larger than you'd expect. Luckily they do come with an adapter so they don't need to go direct into the wall.
Installing them was a breeze, one adapter plugged right into the back of the broadband cable modem and the other into our existing home office network. Both units have a "1-touch security" button on the top, pressing these allow you secure your network and - presto! - we were up and running.
Adding more computers in the same room is pretty straight forward, especially if you already have a wireless router, and adding more computers to multiple rooms is just a case of getting hold of an additional single Powerline adapter.