best homepna products?

[Hoops]

im looking around at the different homepna 2.0 products and had a few questions:

1. who make the best or most reliable pci version (since it is probably the fastest of all interfaces)
2. how does the latency and bandwidth compare to wireless considering the price (in practice)
3. wait for 3.0?
4. Good or bad experinces pci, usb, or any interface
or any opinion you may have about home phone line

thx,
Hoops

 

[rw120555]

I've had good experience with Netgear's homepna equipment. Alas, at the moment, homepna isn't the hottest or cheapest technology; you might be able to get better deals with homeplug (powerline) equipment. Homepna 3.0 (assuming it eventually shows up) will be many times faster. But, it is at least several months away. Wireless is obviously the most popular technology right now, but unless you've got a laptop, I don't think its advantages over the alternatives are all that great. A lot depends on how well wireless will work in your particular environment. It seems to me people sometimes go to a lot of work to get wireless going in their house when it would be a lot easier just to get homepna or homeplug.

For more info, see http://www.homepna.org/ and http://www.homeplug.org/

What exactly is your current setup? Are you just trying to connect 2 machines or a bunch? I have 3 small clusters of machines (2 in each location); all machines have ethernet nics. I switched from internal hpna cards to external hpna/ethernet bridges (got a netgear pe102 and a Linksys hpb200 relatively cheap off of Ebay). I like this better because, within each cluster, the machines can communicate much more quickly with each other. And eventually, I can just replace the bridges rather than have to open up my machines and install or uninstall cards.

 

[hojl]

rw120555 knows alot I think he answers(ed) most of my homepna questions..
I have (had now since my router/bridge went bad compex type) 2 computers with diamond homepna (got them cheap at compgeeks when they were dumping them).
with the router/bridge I didn't have much trouble setting it up just plug and play.

Speed? latency? hmm didn't really measure but accessing the internet using a cable modem seems to be about the same using my homepna, my wifes wireless, or my other computer with direct cat5 connection...
I didn;t measure this scientifically but not a noticeable decrease..

 

[rw120555]

Yes, I have a hodgepodge of networking methods too (homepna, wireless, and direct cat5) and as far as internet access goes I never notice any difference no matter what I am using. I suppose a gaming fanatic might. Wireless will fade in and out as I walk around my house with my laptop -- I really like the flexibility of being able to move around with a laptop, but with my house at least I don't think an all wireless setup would be too viable. I posted a while back about this gizmo that combines powerline with 802.11b -- I think stuff like that may become more common and could be extremely useful. Another big breakthrough, I think, will be when/if phoneline and powerline break the 100MB barrier, as they will supposedly do in the next year or two. You'll see more and more emphasis on multimedia within the home once you start getting up to those speeds.

 

[Hoops]

Right now I want to network 2 comps (no laptops). Ive used wireless a lot with my zaurus at school but the performance is fickle: sometimes the connection loses strength and the buffer fills up for the few seconds and nothing happens until the connection returns (very frustrating). That is where I think homepna has a clear advantage, minimal interference and therefore lower latencies? And of course price. I've found diamond 10mb/s cards for $10 all over and some cards (3com and intel) for cheap as well on ebay. But the complaints ive heard are that the connections are not reliable and the cards sometimes fail quickly. But the biggest is the lack of good internet connection sharing software. But to me the latter problem is not that big a deal. Can't you just make the connected computer the proxy server as well and tell the other computer the ports that the proxy uses for http, ftp, email and so on? Its the first two reliablity questions im worried about but for 20 bucks I guess it is worth a try?
As for powerline, isnt the top speed like 1mb/s and im still not completely sold on the implementation of it like how the spikes in voltage and appliance interaction effect the signals.
Ethernet with Cat 5e is still the king of the hill as far as price-performance ratios but definately not an easy setup. (wiring)
But as far as actual performance with phone line net 2.0 ive heard from 2mb/s all the way to 16mb/s and considering a max download from a cable modem with be around 1.5 mb/s I dont think it will be a bottleneck.
I looked at home pna .com but didnt see any good eyepopping reviews or coverage. Any other thoughts?
-Hoops

 

[rw120555]

If super-cheap is the goal and you don't mind using one pc as an always on server, then yes, homepna is the way to go. If you can really get cards for $10 apiece, you won't be out too much if you don't like it. You can use ICS for your internet connection sharing, or else the cards may come with their own software (I know Intel cards do). I can't say anything about Diamond; I did have an Intel Anypoint card go bad in less than a year, but other cards worked fine.

Direct from Netgear, you can get pci cards for $36 apiece; you can probably find better prices from other vendors or on Ebay. This card has a "limited lifetime warranty." The USB counterpart from Netgear is also good.

Homeplug will go 14mb now; it is far faster than it used to be.

I get mad at myself sometimes for buying cheap stuff that soon fails to meet my needs. But, then I often realize that the good stuff I wish I had bought has dropped so much in price that I really didn't lose anything by going cheap to begin with.