HomePlug’s continuing saga of computing anywhere
Before WiFi, computing anywhere in the house meant installing Ethernet cabling and RJ45 jacks everywhere. Not a simple task and best done as part of a major renovation – unless you are making a home decorating statement with exposed Cat5. A few solutions have appeared over the past decade, but as WiFi gained traction and publicity, these alternatives faded from the limelight.
One of these, called HomePlug, is alive and well and the solution is as appealing as when the HomePlug Powerline Alliance introduced its first standard in 2001. HomePlug’s answer to “no new wires” is simple – use the wires that already run to every room in your home. That would be your household electrical wiring. It was a brilliant concept, and early attempts at this were partially successful, but problems like electrical interference noise and no standardization among manufacturers needed resolution. Today, the technology has matured and is very usable.
There are several manufacturers offering a few dozen products that piggyback Ethernet data communications signals on your home’s electrical wiring. The products offer data transfer equal to or better than WiFi, and standardization has meant that company A’s products should work with Company B’s, as is the case with Ethernet products in general. I recently had a chance to test Actiontec’s MegaPlug AV products – the “AV” gives a hint that these are meant to handle the big bandwidth that PC-based home theatre content generates. The original HomePlug ran at around 14Mbps and later generations such as Actiontec’s standard MegaPlugs run 85Mbps. The “AV” designation bumps the bandwidth up considerably -- these devices will transfer data at up to 200Mbps. By comparison, WiFi’s various versions come in at 11Mbps (802.11b), 54Mbps (802.11g) and 100Mbps (802.11n).
Setting up a HomePlug network practically as simple as plugging in a toaster – two toasters, actually, since the basic MegaPlug AV kit comes with two adapters. These resemble AC adapters with a two-pronged plug for the electrical outlet and an RJ45 jack for Ethernet. They also have three LED status lights. You plug one MegaPlug into any electrical outlet near a router, hub or cable/DSL modem, and then connect a length Ethernet cable between the MegaPlug and your network connection. Where you plug in the second MegaPlug adapter really doesn’t matter – and that’s the essential beauty of HomePlug technology. Any of your electrical outlets are now also Ethernet ports once you plug the adapter in. You can connect a computer, a network printer, another hub or wireless access point to the Ethernet port on the MegaPlug and you are networked. My MegaPlug experience was really as simple as that – no drivers to load, just plug and play. A small “but” is that if you want to manage the devices, such as changing the 128-bit encryption key, you do need to install software that comes on the included CD.
In my house, the cable modem comes into a room on the northeast corner, but isn’t it always the case that where I sometimes want to compute is in a spare room in the southwest corner. My old 802.11b access point is barely detectable across that distance and I’ve been meaning to pull a network cable to a more central location and relocate the wireless access point there. Now I don’t have to because I have the access point plugged into the MegaPlug in the middle of the house. I now get a full 11Mbps signal strength throughout the house, which is more than enough for everyday tasks like email and Internet access. If I want to take advantage of the bigger bandwidth that the AV product offers, I can plug my laptop directly into the Megaplug Ethernet port.
Actiontec’s product conforms to the alliance’s HomePlug AV standard, which is the next generation specification designed to address high-bandwidth entertainment applications in the home. It is backwardly compatible with the existing HomePlug 1.0 standard. You can use up to 16 HomePlug devices on the same network.
Giving HomePlug an industrial strength footprint is a technology called BPL, or Broadband over Powerline, a potential competitor to other high speed network technologies. Just as cable networking uses existing cableTV cabling and DSL works over existing phone lines, BPL is an attempt to exploit the electrical grid itself for data communication. Victoria-based 3One Networks Corp. is one company working to commercialize BPL. Earlier this year, 3One developed a BPL-based power grid management system in China, which allows the power company to monitor the grid’s performance.
Before WiFi, computing anywhere in the house meant installing Ethernet cabling and RJ45 jacks everywhere. Not a simple task and best done as part of a major renovation – unless you are making a home decorating statement with exposed Cat5. A few solutions have appeared over the past decade, but as WiFi gained traction and publicity, these alternatives faded from the limelight.
One of these, called HomePlug, is alive and well and the solution is as appealing as when the HomePlug Powerline Alliance introduced its first standard in 2001. HomePlug’s answer to “no new wires” is simple – use the wires that already run to every room in your home. That would be your household electrical wiring. It was a brilliant concept, and early attempts at this were partially successful, but problems like electrical interference noise and no standardization among manufacturers needed resolution. Today, the technology has matured and is very usable.
There are several manufacturers offering a few dozen products that piggyback Ethernet data communications signals on your home’s electrical wiring. The products offer data transfer equal to or better than WiFi, and standardization has meant that company A’s products should work with Company B’s, as is the case with Ethernet products in general. I recently had a chance to test Actiontec’s MegaPlug AV products – the “AV” gives a hint that these are meant to handle the big bandwidth that PC-based home theatre content generates. The original HomePlug ran at around 14Mbps and later generations such as Actiontec’s standard MegaPlugs run 85Mbps. The “AV” designation bumps the bandwidth up considerably -- these devices will transfer data at up to 200Mbps. By comparison, WiFi’s various versions come in at 11Mbps (802.11b), 54Mbps (802.11g) and 100Mbps (802.11n).
Setting up a HomePlug network practically as simple as plugging in a toaster – two toasters, actually, since the basic MegaPlug AV kit comes with two adapters. These resemble AC adapters with a two-pronged plug for the electrical outlet and an RJ45 jack for Ethernet. They also have three LED status lights. You plug one MegaPlug into any electrical outlet near a router, hub or cable/DSL modem, and then connect a length Ethernet cable between the MegaPlug and your network connection. Where you plug in the second MegaPlug adapter really doesn’t matter – and that’s the essential beauty of HomePlug technology. Any of your electrical outlets are now also Ethernet ports once you plug the adapter in. You can connect a computer, a network printer, another hub or wireless access point to the Ethernet port on the MegaPlug and you are networked. My MegaPlug experience was really as simple as that – no drivers to load, just plug and play. A small “but” is that if you want to manage the devices, such as changing the 128-bit encryption key, you do need to install software that comes on the included CD.
In my house, the cable modem comes into a room on the northeast corner, but isn’t it always the case that where I sometimes want to compute is in a spare room in the southwest corner. My old 802.11b access point is barely detectable across that distance and I’ve been meaning to pull a network cable to a more central location and relocate the wireless access point there. Now I don’t have to because I have the access point plugged into the MegaPlug in the middle of the house. I now get a full 11Mbps signal strength throughout the house, which is more than enough for everyday tasks like email and Internet access. If I want to take advantage of the bigger bandwidth that the AV product offers, I can plug my laptop directly into the Megaplug Ethernet port.
Actiontec’s product conforms to the alliance’s HomePlug AV standard, which is the next generation specification designed to address high-bandwidth entertainment applications in the home. It is backwardly compatible with the existing HomePlug 1.0 standard. You can use up to 16 HomePlug devices on the same network.
Giving HomePlug an industrial strength footprint is a technology called BPL, or Broadband over Powerline, a potential competitor to other high speed network technologies. Just as cable networking uses existing cableTV cabling and DSL works over existing phone lines, BPL is an attempt to exploit the electrical grid itself for data communication. Victoria-based 3One Networks Corp. is one company working to commercialize BPL. Earlier this year, 3One developed a BPL-based power grid management system in China, which allows the power company to monitor the grid’s performance.
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