What is HPNA?

[theprobbka]

I know it's some sort of networking thru phone lines. But what else? Anyone had any experience with it?

 

[jm0ris0n]

First off HPNA stands for Home Phoneline Networking Alliance . It is available in two flavors: hpna 1.0 and hpna 2.0. The first being limited to speeds of 1 mbps and the latter being 10 mbps. I am currently running this as a solutin for my house's networking needs and I can tell you that when benchmarking with sandra its more like 13mbps (over 1 megabyte per second ). I have 2 3com hpna nics installed on 2 machines. I bought the 3com kit in april 2000 and they've been on over 6 motherboards, win98, win98se, winme, win2k pro and worked in every one (although 3com only "officially" supports win98se). Now that the standard has matured quite a bit and gained market acceptance you can find a hpna 2.0 nic from about every major manufacturer out there. The hpna standard uses your house's wired telephone system to connect all the machines. This operates at a much higher frequency than your pots (plain old telephone service) so interference is not an issue (ie use phone and network at the same time). Aside from having the 2 nics I own the Linksys HPRO200 HPNA cable/dsl router. This is a fantastic solution for practically sharing internet access with multiple rooms in a house at an affordable price. The hpna standard allows for up to 64 (or 32?) computers to be connected to the network through the wall jack, daisy chaining (one computer to another), or any other creative way that can be found. Latency is in fact less on the hpna system than it is using a 200ft cat5 cable and 2 10/100 nics.

If you are looking for recommendations for a nic brand I'd like to recommend Linksys. They have always made decent network cards and they keep their prices affordable. The Hpro200 router I have can be found online for around 150 (if not lower!) and is completely loaded.

It has: rj45 in (connect from cable/dsl modem ; rj45 out (10/100 nic, or family console), 1 pots out (to connect telephone to), 2x in/out telephone jacks to connect one to wall socket and other for possible computer in room where router is. -forgot it acts as a firewall

In conclusion the hpna standard is a clearly viable solution for multi-room networks. It is more cost effective than wireless, and a lot more practical than wiring the whole house with cat5 (and cheaper!). The downside is it is not as widely used as ethernet, but that?s about the only thing I can think of. Installation is easy and works like a charm.


BTW-Try to stay away from intel's hpna solution. I have word to describe it : Rotten.

For more information take a look through homepna.com