Having visited the family over Christmas I brought my laptop back down to my flat with me in case I found a use for it. The first use was on the train where I took advantage of National Express’ free wireless on the trains. It wasn’t too bad, aside from a couple of internet drops and a bit of lag; but on a train I was hardly expecting wonders and it certainly helped alleviate boredom.
Once back in my flat I figured it’d be sensible to connect it up to my wireless network provided by my BT HomeHub. This all went simply enough, but the connection (despite seemingly being strong) was never reliable; even when sat next to the wireless access point. This is something I had previously experienced with my Nintendo DS, and I’m putting it down to the mass of interference that is no doubt being given off by my TV/PC (with bluetooth adapter)/XBox/BT-Vision box.
Thinking about this a bit more I decided that chances are I’d never really want to use my laptop in the lounge anyway, and that therefore the only room that I would want to use it in would be the bedroom. I also remembered that I had a set of homeplug adapters that I got with my BT-Vision kit that I never found use for. Clearly this was a perfect opportunity to try them out.
They were remarkably easy to set up, plug them into power, plug the one in the lounge into the network and plug the laptop into the other. Done. Their box claims speeds of up to 200mbps, and while sceptical I’ve got nothing over 100mbps to test them with, and don’t really care as I’m only going to be using it for web anyway.
As a result I’ve also killed off my wireless, as I’m not likely to use it (and couldn’t with the signal dropping as much as it was), and now have a single wire going along the wall in my lounge until I get another 4-way to go with the rest of the stuff by the TV… still, beats having to run a wire all around my flat and does the job.