Netgear Wall-Plugged Ethernet Bridge

I wanted to move the Airport Express back to the office to use it as a print server.  In order to do that, I needed to find a different solution to bring a network drop down to the living room.  I decided to go with the Netgear Wall-Plugged Ethernet Bridge.

The ethernet bridge is very easy to use.  You connect on of the to modules into an outlet near a router, and plug an ethernet cable into it.  Then you plug the other one into an outlet where you need a network drop.




This works pretty well.  In fact the mac mini and the PS2 are connected to this in the living room.  I checked the latency going across the bridge, and it was about 2ms.  (About the same a wireless).

Also, it is possible to configure encryption for this connection.  This would prevent your neighbors from being able to see your network.  Unfortunatelly, it uses a Windows application to set this up.

I do wonder how well the signals go across the different phases of the house electrical system.  If this is like X10, this would require a bridge across the phases to let the signal go across, with out going to the street first.  Maybe this actually transmits both a in-phase and out of phase signal.

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