As cool and as easy to use as WiFi is, sometimes you just need a real wire to get things done. Things like streaming HD content for example. Or maybe connecting an Xbox 360 to your DSL connection at the other end of the house.
For certain things a real wire is better, but unless you handy enough to start carving up your house, or smart enough to have every room wired with Ethernet when your house is built, your pretty much screwed right?
Well not anymore. D-Link is launching a $139 power line kit to turn your existing home power lines into Ethernet cables.
D-Links claim the units are plug and play, so just plug one into a power outlet by your home router, plug in an Ethernet cable between the router and the D-Link unit. Go to the other end of the house, and plug in the other D-Link unit by the device you want to connect and hook up the Ethernet cables. Boom you are done. You should be able to send data across the system at up 200mbs. More than enough to stream HD content across your house, connect to the internet for gaming and watch Hulu in the other room. Assuming your Internet connection can handle all of that.
They even claim to have some sort of QoS control so you can prioritize traffic to your game console if you are running a switch on both ends of the power line connection.
If you need a quick wired connection, to put a new device online, this could be the way to go.
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Note: The link below is for the DHP 301 power line kit. The kit discussed above is the DHP 303. I’m sure Amazon will have the 303’s in stock soon, but in the mean time the 301’s do almost the same thing for a few bucks less. D-Link DHP-301 Powerline HD Ethernet Kit
