HumblePie
Lifer
Well, I've been having a bad run of setting up wireless in my house. Since I'm renting, I can't drop cable or run wires from one room to another. Since my cable outlet is downstairs and my computer is upstairs, I've been trying different routers/wireless cards with various degrees of success the past 9 months. For awhile I said screw it and ran a 100ft ethernet cable of the stairs from the router downstairs just so I didn't have to deal with the latency while playing games.
I ended up finally coming across these linksys PLK300 devices.
At first I was skeptical. I've tried something like this in the past and it was utterfail when I tried the "homelink" product before. It was slow, dropped signal a lot, and ended up being a big headache. Once working retail in electronic stores I've sold a fair share of older setups to these and got to watch most of them being returned to the store. As such, I almost passed these by. However, something got me to looking at specs and customer reviews. The reviews on newegg and amazon actually seemed decent for the product to do what I wanted.
So I decided to give these a try. I must say they are working very well. I basically hooked my modem up to my trendnet N router and then hooked up the router up to one of the paired linksys devices that plugs directly into a wall socket downstairs.
Upstairs, I plugged in the other paired linksys device to the wall and ran ethernet from that to my computer. I ran tests for comparisons using downstairs HTPC hooked directly into the router and my upstairs gaming computer. Basically with about 50 feet of distance or so, I was getting exceptional results. My internet speedtest results were the same for both machines. About 18ms ping to a San Antonio speedtest station with 27Mbps download and 1.8Mbps upload. Was the same for both machines.
I then tested the speeds of sending files between the two computers and was getting around 86MBps transfer rates. Not bad considering they are communicating through these devices and a 10/100 router. Wish I was using a gigabit router for more tests.
All in all I must say that this product is a resounding success for me. No more latency from wireless gaming or other random problems caused by wireless connections. It's like running a direct ethernet cords to all my network devices without actually running those cords. It doesn't seem to affect anything negatively in the house either running off the power. For the price I paid, it was about the same cost of a good wireless router minus the need to purchase wireless cards for everything. So the price is cheaper when looking at it from this point of view.
I ended up finally coming across these linksys PLK300 devices.
At first I was skeptical. I've tried something like this in the past and it was utterfail when I tried the "homelink" product before. It was slow, dropped signal a lot, and ended up being a big headache. Once working retail in electronic stores I've sold a fair share of older setups to these and got to watch most of them being returned to the store. As such, I almost passed these by. However, something got me to looking at specs and customer reviews. The reviews on newegg and amazon actually seemed decent for the product to do what I wanted.
So I decided to give these a try. I must say they are working very well. I basically hooked my modem up to my trendnet N router and then hooked up the router up to one of the paired linksys devices that plugs directly into a wall socket downstairs.
Upstairs, I plugged in the other paired linksys device to the wall and ran ethernet from that to my computer. I ran tests for comparisons using downstairs HTPC hooked directly into the router and my upstairs gaming computer. Basically with about 50 feet of distance or so, I was getting exceptional results. My internet speedtest results were the same for both machines. About 18ms ping to a San Antonio speedtest station with 27Mbps download and 1.8Mbps upload. Was the same for both machines.
I then tested the speeds of sending files between the two computers and was getting around 86MBps transfer rates. Not bad considering they are communicating through these devices and a 10/100 router. Wish I was using a gigabit router for more tests.
All in all I must say that this product is a resounding success for me. No more latency from wireless gaming or other random problems caused by wireless connections. It's like running a direct ethernet cords to all my network devices without actually running those cords. It doesn't seem to affect anything negatively in the house either running off the power. For the price I paid, it was about the same cost of a good wireless router minus the need to purchase wireless cards for everything. So the price is cheaper when looking at it from this point of view.
