Windows 8 : Creating a Windows Network - Choosing a Network and Cabling System (part 3) - Phoneline and Powerline Networking

3. Phoneline and Powerline Networking

HomePNA Alliance devices send network data by transmitting radio signals over your existing telephone wiring, using a network adapter that plugs in to a telephone jack (see Figure 3). These devices don’t interfere with the normal operation of your telephones; the extra signal just hitchhikes along the wires.

Figure 3. Phoneline networking uses existing household telephone wiring to carry a radio frequency signal between networked computers.

Phoneline networking is intended primarily for home use. The products are relatively inexpensive—about $50 per computer—and don’t require you to string cables around the house. They’re very convenient, and their signal will usually go much farther than a wireless networking signal. However, they have some disadvantages:

• All your adapters must be plugged into the same telephone line. Therefore, the same extension must be present at a phone outlet near each of your computers. If you need to call in a wiring contractor to add a phone extension, you haven’t saved much over a regular wired network.

• “Access point” devices, used to link a standard wired-networked computer to your phoneline or powerline network, are relatively rare.

• 10Mbps is fine for sharing an Internet connection or printers, but you’ll find that it’s too slow to back up a chock-full hard disk over your network—it could take days!

Without a hardware access point, it’s difficult to use a hardware Internet Connection Sharing device or to add standard wired computers to your network. However, Windows 8 can manage it in software, if necessary.

HomePlug (HomePlug Powerline Alliance) adapters work in a similar fashion, sending signals through your electrical wiring, and are plugged into a wall socket. These also provide 10Mbps performance, and they are more flexible than the phoneline system because you don’t need a phone jack near your computers—just a nearby electrical outlet. Powerline networking can’t cross the utility company’s transformers, so it usually works only within a single home or office.

In addition, you can get HomePlug devices called bridges, which are specifically designed to link a wired network to the powerline network, for about $80. You can use one of these to easily add a shared Internet Connection Sharing router or mix in wired computers. Figure 4 shows how this would look in a typical home network.

Figure 4. Typical powerline networking setup, showing HomePlug adapters and bridges.

4. 1000Mbps Ethernet (Gigabit Ethernet)

Ultra-high-speed Gigabit Ethernet networking is probably overkill for most home and small office networks, but it’s sometimes found in the corporate world and in fields such as medical imaging and video editing. Gigabit speed can also help if you back up your hard disk over your network from one computer to another, or copy large video files. The adapter cost is so low that many new PCs and all Macs now come with 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet adapters built in as standard equipment.

It sounds great at first, but here are some things to consider:

• It won’t speed up your Internet connection (unless, perhaps, you have Fiber-to-the-Home service), and it won’t improve the streaming of HD video within your home. Standard 100Mbps Ethernet will do just fine for these applications.

• You will only realize a speed benefit when a large amount of data is moving between two devices that both have gigabit connections and when both can actually feed data to the network at a high speed.

• If you have to buy a Gigabit Ethernet adapter for a computer (that is, if the adapter built into the computer’s motherboard is only 10/100Mbps), it only makes sense to go gigabit if you can install a PCI-e adapter. Regular PCI cards can’t move data to and from the CPU fast enough to make gigabit worthwhile.

• Most consumer/small office network-attached storage (disk) devices are way too slow internally to benefit from gigabit connections. You should see a benefit when backing up to or copying files to or from another Windows computer’s shared drive.

If you want to use Gigabit Ethernet, you need to use CAT-5E or CAT-6 certified connectors and cabling; CAT-5 gear might work (and then only if all four wire pairs inside the cable are connected on all of your cables), but don’t chance it. You should use only commercially manufactured patch cables or professionally installed wiring.