Brain Candy #109 - Newer Isn't Always Better

We've had a wired network for years. Catherine works in her room and I work in mine and we share a printer and broadband modem - it's worked great. The past few summers have made us long for a way to move from these non-air-conditioned rooms to an air-conditioned room in the summer, but there isn't any Ethernet cable running into that room. We weren't going to be knocking any more holes in the walls to string cable since our previous experiences with that had been no fun at all. I resisted a wireless router mostly for security reasons. It's new technology to me and while I'm no Ned Ludd, I don't always dance on the bleeding edge either.

So, if you need a network connection and you don't want to use cable, and you don't want to use wireless, what are your options? There are several actually, and two of them involve wiring already in your house. You can use your phone wiring, or you can use your electrical wiring. I tried the latter, called power line networking. The principle behind power line (and phone line) networking is that as long as the frequencies being used for network communication are not close to those used for power/phone, the wires can carry another signal. The power line frequency is 60 hertz, while power line networking works in the tens of megahertz range - very different frequency ranges. If you have nothing filtering your power line, it should work.

For us, it didn't. I'm not through exhausting the possibilities. I actually think the problem might be in the computer I was using to try to coordinate the network, rather than the networking hardware or our house power lines. I used a different computer and got encouraging results, but I haven't followed it through to a working network yet. I'm keeping the hardware to play with it a bit more, since it isn't very expensive technology and it might prove useful in the future.

What it comes down to is I just got impatient. I was expecting a very simple path to a flexible network and it turned out to not be simple enough. I bought the power line hardware on-line from NewEgg. They ship very quickly. I had my order in a couple of days. Still, after my initial lack of success, I wanted a working network and I wanted it quickly. It was time to consider wireless. I decided that since the technology was new to me, I wanted to buy locally, so I could take it back easily if it didn't work.

My next shock was finding out that the big names in networking have been modifying their devices of late. I won't name names, but based on recent reviews I've read, it seems that the biggies in the field have found that cutting corners on wireless routers, the central hub of a wireless network, is very profitable. I used NewEgg's customer reviews to help me find this out. Normally, I would consider this to be marginally dishonest, since I didn't plan to buy from them. Two things eased my conscience, however. I'm a past, present and future good customer of NewEgg, and if I couldn't find what I wanted locally, they would get the business. Anyway, a major recent home networking book from a publisher I trust greatly, recommended a certain wireless router. It was a mid-range unit, on the market for awhile, so one might assume it was stable technology. It was on sale locally at a good price, but I looked at the customer reviews, just to make sure that it fit my needs. Well, it didn't. Apparently, the units that have been shipped to customers recently don't work nearly as well as older versions of the same model. The units have been downgraded and cheapened without changing the model number. The customer service telephone experiences of those afflicted with these units sounded ghastly as well. Call the support number and you would get someone who barely speaks English, and doesn't understand wireless routers in any language. So I went to the next big player in home wireless networking and found the exact same thing. They've just reengineered their comparable wireless router too and, surprise, many customers are finding that they just don't do the job anymore either. Amazed and disheartened, I wrote off the big names. Eventually, I found a unit that appeared to be high quality and not too expensive (after several accursed rebate forms are filled in.) If you're curious, I bought a D-Link DI-634M wireless router which has continued to get good reviews, even recently. I plugged it in, tweaked the settings, and I have a really nice wireless network now, that I think is also really secure.

The moral I draw from this is pretty cynical. Don't trust any vendor and don't trust anything but recent observations about a product. If you're buying something important, go to the Internet and try to find the most current information you can.