If you are like me, you have some form of high-speed internet coming into your house. You probably have Cable or DSL or something else, and then a “main” router where there the Internet comes from “out there” to “in here”. You probably then have it served up with a wireless router. Me? I have Comcast cable piped into a NETGEAR WNR2000 Wireless-N Router
. From there, I send the wires out to three computers in the room for my wife and kids. I then use the wireless with my notebook around Works pretty well.
But I have an office upstairs, and I wanted to put a server up there as well as a notebook on a desk for my use. That’s two computers. Now the notebook has a wireless care built in, but the server doesn’t, and I loathed the idea of putting a wireless card in a desktop. I could run a wire up through the house, but what a pain in the butt. So I needed to figure out how to get my wireless signal up to a router in my office.
I went to Best Buy and I got a Linksys Bridge
. It was a bit tricky to set up, but I did, and it worked pretty well. It was somewhat intermittent, but I was able to have switch up in my office with connectivity to any number of machines.
But then, out of nowhere, the thing stopped working. It just bricked itself. No lights, no power, no nothing. Great. So, off to Best Buy again, with a determination not buy that Linksys Bridge again. So the nice sales gal there pointed me to a NetGear Gaming router that is basically a wireless bridge. I guess that these things are very popular for gaming consoles so they market them mostly to gamers. So I’m slowly walking out, and this other guy comes up to me and says “That will work for what you want, but I can show you something that is faster and more reliable”.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I am into faster and more reliable, so I followed him, and he showed me this:
I was a bit hesitant at first, as it seemed a bit strange to pump my connection through my household power lines and the box explicitly calls it an “XBox 360” kit (that gaming thing again), but the guy said it works perfectly for a regular network and that he’d personally take my return if it didn’t work exactly like I wanted.
Well, as far as I can tell, he’ll never see me again. This thing worked like a charm. It was pathetically easy to install – network cable out of my router, into device, which I plugged into the wall. Then, up in the office, I plug in the other one, with a network cable out of it into my switch. Simple, clean, and easy. It worked immediately, and the total setup time (hardware only, no software to configure) was literally five minutes.
So far, it’s working great. I now want to find out if I can buy one of these things and use it in yet another room. That would be even cooler, as we have a renter who’d really appreciate that.
All in all, a purchase that I’m really happy with.
Share or Bookmark this post…