A few months back I moved into a new house.  Since then I’ve finished most of my unpacking and moving in but a few projects have definitely lingered.  Most notably is running Ethernet cable all around the house.  The issue is I’ve got hardwood floors in the upstairs so running along baseboards/carpet just isn’t an option, nor is running in the ceilings.  So my only option is to drill into the side of the house and run it outside and that isn’t fun either.  So for now I’ve just had a long Ethernet cable running through the main floor of the house.  While it’s esthetically wonderful I should probably come up with a better solution as clearly I’ll trip over it and kill myself soon.

Belkin recently announced a powerline Ethernet adaptor that is capable of 1GB/sec.  Yup, 1GB/sec.  Given that, I figured it was time to try these little things out so I stopped off a BestBuy and picked up a set (they didn’t have the new Belkin ones so I went with the Netgear XAV101).  For $129 a set they are perfect.

Setup took all of 3 minutes.  The hardest part was getting behind my stereo in the living room to get to the wall outlet.  I plugged in there, plugged in my office, plug into networking on both ends and DONE.  My first test was to stream a 1080p Bluray rip from my PC to my Xbox in the living room.  Perfect, not a single stutter.  Next I streamed live 1080i television (so uncompressed and takes gobs of bandwidth) from my Media Center PC to the Xbox – again perfect, no issues at all.  Wow.

So if you need to get Ethernet around the house and don’t have cable get a set of these and try them out.  Isn’t it great when things just work?