I did it.
I pulled the trigger.
I bought two Netgear HomePNA bridges.
It lets you use your home's phone lines for networking.
I didn't want to network my old house with CAT5 and the cost of the Netgear bridges was justified versus the price of CAT5 and wall plates and my time.
One bridge is hooked up to my SMC Router and the phone jack in that room. The other bridge is hooked up to the phone jack in a bedroom which is hooked up to a hub and this is hooked up to any PC that happens to be on my KVM switch that I use when I'm working on PCs and my Linux box.
Install TCP/IP, DHCP and >>BAM<< I'm on the net!
When you install the Netgear card, you install the included drivers and Windows simply sees it as a regular network card, but I didn't want to do this because I wanted more versitility and the cards only have Windows drivers, so I bought the two bridges and now I can hook any PC up with a regular NIC and network through the phone line just by setting one of the bridges to "uplink" or by using the uplink port on my hub.
The connection is not too bad, either. I've been sucking MP3s through the phone line with no problem and even when my wife is on the phone, there is no noise on the phone line and it doesn't affect connectivity.
I just wanted to share this with you guys that are hesitant to drop cable and think wireless is too expensive (because it is!).
I pulled the trigger.
I bought two Netgear HomePNA bridges.
It lets you use your home's phone lines for networking.
I didn't want to network my old house with CAT5 and the cost of the Netgear bridges was justified versus the price of CAT5 and wall plates and my time.
One bridge is hooked up to my SMC Router and the phone jack in that room. The other bridge is hooked up to the phone jack in a bedroom which is hooked up to a hub and this is hooked up to any PC that happens to be on my KVM switch that I use when I'm working on PCs and my Linux box.
Install TCP/IP, DHCP and >>BAM<< I'm on the net!
When you install the Netgear card, you install the included drivers and Windows simply sees it as a regular network card, but I didn't want to do this because I wanted more versitility and the cards only have Windows drivers, so I bought the two bridges and now I can hook any PC up with a regular NIC and network through the phone line just by setting one of the bridges to "uplink" or by using the uplink port on my hub.
The connection is not too bad, either. I've been sucking MP3s through the phone line with no problem and even when my wife is on the phone, there is no noise on the phone line and it doesn't affect connectivity.
I just wanted to share this with you guys that are hesitant to drop cable and think wireless is too expensive (because it is!).
