Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

Even as the IEEE P1901 working group was set to meet this week to recommend its draft standard for broadband over powerline networks for official status, Netgear announced its line of Powerline AV 500 adapters that incorporate the HomePlug-compatible flavor of the standard. The new devices theoretically promise up to gigabit Ethernet speeds over home electrical wiring, and are the first to incorporate the newest standard.

Wireless networking is great. It offers freedom and is fairly easy to use. Unfortunately, WiFi often offers less than ideal bandwidth for large file transfers for video playback. Cable? Sure, if you have money to pay someone or are willing to drill holes and feed Cat 6 wires everywhere. Enter HomePlug. While not a perfect solution, HomePlug has been an option for those who want more reliable speeds without having to run cable everywhere. The speeds were not great at first, but with its latest iteration, streaming HD video can be a reality. While setting up a home network may get complicated with all these options, I think it is great that we have these options to fit each of our different needs and environments.

"On one end of the connection, you have a notebook. That notebook sports an Arrandale-based processor (Wireless Display employs the integrated HD Graphics engine), a current-gen Centrino-branded wireless adapter, Intel’s My WiFi software pre-installed, and Windows 7. At the other end sits Netgear’s Push2TV adapter with an HDMI cable running to your TV. In between? Nothing but air."

Intel is promoting it's Wireless Display technology. What is it? It is a system that allows you to stream video from your computer, presumably a laptop, to a box that's attached to your TV. Seriously? I suppose it might have some value if the adapter was integrated into the TV itself, but since you still have to hook up a box to the TV, I wonder why it would not be better to hook up one of the billions of media players, many of which even have wireless adapters built in. Chances are it would even provide better quality video. I kind of see this as making the whole watching videos on your TV a bit more complicated than is necessary. Can anyone think of a use for this that is not better served through a dedicated device?

"CeBIT 2010 kicks off today over in Germany, and despite the fact that CES was held less than 8 weeks ago, you can expect the world's leading manufacturers to announce yet more kit to tempt you this year. Quick out of the blocks is Netgear, who have announced adaptors for faster powerline networking in the form of the Powerline AV 500 Adapter Kit (XAVB5001), a new high performance wireless networking kit for home theatres, in the shape of the High-Performance HD Home Theater Kit (WNHDB3004) and finally in the small business arena, two new ReadyNAS rack-mounted network storage devices."

It's hard to believe that 8 weeks ago manufacturers were announcing new kit and technologies at CES 2010, and now 8 weeks later in Germany at CeBIT 2010 they have even more new kit to announce. We Got Served has the news that Netgear have announced new Powerline devices and HD Home Theatre kit as well as new NAS devices. It will be interesting to see what else comes out this week from Germany.