Powerline products are cool if you don’t want the latency and delay associated with normal wireless connections. Just use a power socket for networking your house.

Sometimes the best idea is to use what you’ve already got. Why lay out Ethernet cable when a home PC network can also be created using standard electrical wiring? After all, wall sockets are available in almost every room. The tool to make this possible is called a Powerline adapter. The devices are available with different bandwidths and designs, allowing you to share an Internet connection throughout your house, but also perform tasks like transferring music.

Develo, a hardware maker, calls its Powerline product dLAN. The corresponding dLAN high-speed Ethernet adapter allows for transfer rates of 85 megabits per second (Mbit/s) through a home’s electrical system. That number represents a theoretical value, however, one that is not achieved in practice. The HomePlug standard used by Develo and 70 other companies translates into an actual transfer rate of up to 30 Mbit/s.