Bought a zyxel home plug kit yesterday (the 85mbit/s version) so far i'm very impressed with it.
I get great signal on my wi-fi upstairs on my desktop but I was getting a about 1 - 2% packetloss and jitter on the wi-fi which was causing most online FPS games to be unplayable, as it would cause me to freeze for a moment (very problematic if trying to fly a helicopter on BF2)
The home plugs sync at 80mbit/s which i thought was reasonable considering my pc is on a 5meter extension cable and the one at the other end is on a 3way extension with the router and dect phone.
Was just playing half-life2 death match on a UK server and getting 15ms ping
, (didn't help the fact i'm pretty awful at the game tho
)
ping time to the router over the home plugs is usually between 2 - 4 ms so its not as good as wired but its a lot easier than running cat5 everywhere
my wi-fi did ping slightly faster usually apart from when some packets went awol or hit 2000ms (which i guess was what caused FPS games to run badly over the wi-fi)
Also while i was at it I ran cat5 in to my xbox360 and mac mini (which are in the same room as the pc) put those on a switch and then plugged the home plug adaptor into the switch, it works great and the transfers between the pc and the Mac are now a lot faster (100mbit wired since they are on the same switch vs the 54g wireless link they had before)
Also since i pulled my wi-fi card out my pc i've not yet had a BSOD wander if it was the vista drivers for the wi-fi card causing them.
Only problem I had is the zyxel utility was a bit of a pain to get to run on vista, the installer won't install it you have to copy the utility from the disc/download as its just stored in a folder, But once i'd done that and ran the utility as administrator i got that working
Its nice to have a piece of kit that you just plug in and it works for once though.
Also solves the problem of setting up WPA under linux when I reinstall ubuntu later
So if your a gamer, or find otherwise wi-fi won't quite cut it, home plug appears to be a good solution, a tad expensive but hopefully as the technology matures they will come down in price.
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