5. Wrap Up

If you set out to design the worst posssible electrical environment for high speed data networking, you'd be hard pressed to come up with something worse than your home or office's electrical wiring. It's noisy, has no dependable impedance (important for designing high-speed circuits), and is otherwise a just plain nasty place to use for anything other than supplying power. But through the wonders of HomePlug's digital signal processing, OFDM modulation, and, in my opinion, just plain magic, Linksys' PLEBR10 looks like it can provide yet another alternative to folks who can't or don't want to run CAT5 cables through their home of office.

With its major competitors holding back or cancelling HomePlug product plans [see this page of my Networld+Interop 2002 report], Linksys has the market virtually to itself. Although average street pricing is around $125, you can (at review time) find the PLEBR10 for as little as $80, which about half the price of their "your mileage may vary" warning certainly applies to HomePlug products, and I'm not saying that it absolutely will work under all conditions. But from what I can see, it's certainly robust enough, and priced low enough, as an alternative for floor-to-floor and (closely spaced) building-to-building connections, or for connecting a few computers in that how-am-I-gonna-run-cable-to-there!? location.