From your local computer shop to the latest laptop advert, everybody seams to be saying you have to go wireless – it’s the best thing since sliced bread, no wires, sit 20 miles away from civilisation on the top of a Welsh mountain. But hang on its not quite that simple, if it was we wouldn’t keep getting people ringing up asking us for an alternative to the wireless kit they have just bought.

The first thing you should know about wireless is that it tends to only transmit for up to 100m or 300 feet, not the 20 miles needed for those of you who like sitting on the top of Welsh mountains (or are they hills?), and that is only achieve in the laboratory in most cases. Start putting walls in the way (as with most houses these days) and the signal drops significantly. This may shock you so I hope you are sitting down – Wireless DOES NOT pass through brick walls (or concrete)! It also has a hard time going through glass if you have Pilkington K glass, the K bit is a metal coating to conserve heat loss, this alone can kill the signal by 30%. It does pass through wood and plasterboard, but it is weakened significantly, but if the plasterboard is foil backed, again due to energy efficiency you will have problems. I am talking about the 2.4GHz wireless as opposed to the newer 5GHz wireless which will pass through these, although any more than 1 brick thickness and again you will have problems. Looks like wireless is not all it’s cracked up to be huh.

So lets look at a typical household setup. The wireless router (probably an ADSL/Broadband wireless router) is downstairs plugged into the phone line, and you want to beam the Internet to the kids bedroom upstairs so they can do their homework online (or so they tell you). Now we know that the wireless signals will have be reduced the more floorboards (wood) and walls (plasterboard with foil) that they have to go through, so they bounce off the walls instead just like one of those rubber balls you used to play with as a kid. If the signal happens to bounce its way to the bedroom without running our of steam then you get a signal show up on the PC, the signal strength shows if it did a lot of bouncing or not so much. But it is not just the strength of the signal that is important, it is the message it sent that you need. Now if the signal bounced around your house in a number of different directions, just as if you threw a box full of rubber balls up the stairs, more than one might make it in to the bedroom. If this is the case then you get an additional problem, loads of signal all with the same message but slightly out of sync with each other (some took a longer route than others to get there). This is the link quality, the more out of sync messages the poorer the quality and less chance for the PC to put them back together and decrypt the message. It seams we can’t win!

So, what if we invest in a bigger antenna than the one that came with the router? People always say bigger is best! Your router probably came with a 2db (low gain) antenna, you could get a high gain 5db antenna and try that. You might think that is like throwing a larger box of rubber balls, but you would be wrong. A higher gain antenna doesn’t throw out more signal, it can only transmit what the router is giving it, instead it is concentrating the signal into a more defined beam, as if we were aiming the box of rubber balls rather than just throwing them. However looking at our scenario of the router downstairs and the PC upstairs we are not going to gain much, because the high gain antenna changes the signal in the wrong direction. The low gain antenna gives off a signal that looks a bit like a balloon with a little dimple at the top, (the antenna doesn’t transmit out of the top). The high gain antenna effectively increases the range of the signal by squashing it into more of a doughnut shape, with more out the sides and less out the top, exactly not what we want for getting a signal upstairs. However you might find that the signal can now bounce further and does manage to get to the PC with less loss of quality but this is unlikely. However you will probably get a better connection any PC’s you have downstairs.

So now that we know why the signal doesn’t get upstairs very well and that upgrading the antenna won’t help what if we upgrade from 11b to 54g, that has to be better because it has a bigger number and therefore is better! The number represent the speed at which the units will communicate, the 11b talks at 11meg and the 54g talks at 54meg, that is all well and good but in order to talk faster it takes more power to transmit and better quality signals arriving at the PC. In our example above this may not make any difference to the connection at all, in fact it may actually make things worse. If the router and PC can’t talk properly at 54 they automatically change to 48 and try that, if that is no good they try 36, then 24, then they try 18. At 18 the signal is the same strength as at 11 so you might end up gaining 7meg if you are lucky. But hang on a minute, how fast is your Internet, 1meg, 2 meg or are you a lucky one with 8meg? Well it makes no difference because when I went to school (just after the chalk and slate had been replaced with pencils and paper) 8 was less than 11 and defiantly less than 54, so you still can’t gain anything going to 54meg because the bottle neck is the Internet speed.

So now that I have told you wireless is a waste of space, cluttering up your house with rubber balls what about the 5GHz wireless is that any better? Well yes, it has a stronger signal giving you better penetration of walls etc, better bounce of the walls (more balls!) and it is effected less by moisture. The 2.4GHz is stopped by water believe it or not, damp walls etc will absorb the signals rather than allow them to bounce off. As we are made up of 70% water you can put your hand around the antenna and cut the signal strength by half! The 5GHz units are slowly coming down in price but they are still out the reach of most families compared to 2.4GHz.

So what is the alternative? Simple, put cables in! You can’t beat a bit of copper wire, (well maybe optic fibre but we won’t go there!). But keeping the significant other half happy and not drilling wholes in walls and running cables along the skirting boards is the reason you went wireless in the first place. Well there is an alternative to wireless that uses cables and there is no need for you to drill, cable or even redecorate, was that a sigh of relief I heard? Your house already has the cables in it that you need to get the Internet to every room in the house, even possibly the garage. Your 240v electric ring main, feeding every 3 pin socket in your house, they are all connected together at your breaker/fuse board. Now using some clever units called PowerLine HomePlugs you can send the Internet from your router downstairs to anywhere you have a 3 pin socket. You could even sit on top of that Welsh mountain as long as you had a 20 mile extension lead, (you would probably need it to charge up your laptop after the power it would consume searching for a wireless connection, and HomePlugs don't actually work over 20 miles but you get the idea). The HomePlugs simply put the Internet signal from the router onto the 240v ring main around your house (or office) and then you tap it off using another HomePlug at the 3 pin socket next to your PC. There is no fancy setting up needed, you simply plug a network cable into the router and then the HomePlug and at the other end you do the same, network cable from HomePlug to PC, the cables even come with the HomePlugs. You can put up to 10 HomePlugs onto a ring main so if you happen to have 9 kids and they all need the Internet you are sorted, but don’t have a 10th child because the 10th HomePlug is connected to the router, remember. You also don’t have the concern of your wireless being connected to by your neighbours, because unless he is wired into your ring main he can’t hook into your mini HomePlug network. If security is a concern for shared offices etc then there is a security CD included to encrypt the network.

It all sounds a bit too good to be true and it is, there are a couple of issues with the HomePlugs. They don’t work if they are plugged into surge protectors, so you will need to use a different socket for the HomePlug if your PC is plugged in via a surge protector, if it isn’t then it should be, for the sake of £10 you could stop your PC going pop in a thunder storm or power cut! The other problem you have 2 choices of speed as with the wireless kit, 14meg and 85meg, but if you take into account what I said earlier about the Internet being the bottle neck then the choice is simple.

If you think HomePlugs might be the way to go take a look at our online shop for details.

It can be found here.