Slingbox Over Your Power Lines
Sling Media, makers of the popular Slingbox series of media servers, has announced two devices that enable you to create a home network without running cabling around your house or relying on occasionally flaky wireless connections. How? By using your power lines. Sling's $100 Turbo 1 device lets you connect one device to a home network just by plugging it into a wall power socket, while the $150 Turbo 4 enables four devices, all at an impressive speed of 85 megabits/second, faster than most wireless routers on the market today. Similar products have been on the market for years, but Sling's devices outpace the competition with impressive speed and relatively low price.
Setting up a power line network is incredibly easy -- usually. All you need to do is plug one adapter into the wall close to your cable modem or the like, run a networking cable from your modem to the wall adapter, then plug in another adapter anywhere in your house where you want your networked device to be. The network signals are then sent over your home's power lines.
Why use this instead of Wi-Fi? Power line networks aren't susceptible to dead spots or interference like Wi-Fi is, and the technology is up to four times faster. It's also more secure. The drawback, though, would be cost. Networking your home with Slingbox's new products will set you back $250, which is a lot more than using a high-speed Wi-Fi router. Secondly, these devices need to be plugged directly into a wall socket. Any surge-protector or power strip will block the networking signal.
But, you needn't necessarily choose on over the other. Power line adapters can be used in tandem with an existing Wi-Fi network for devices that handle large amounts of data. For example, power line device manufacturer, DS2, performed tests in which it integrated an Apple TV into an existing Wi-Fi network via power lines. Where it took the Apple TV 2 hours and 45 minutes to sync 10 gigabytes of data over Wi-Fi, it took only 35 minutes over power lines.
This is definitely an exciting technology that we think will explode once prices fall. We're happy to see a mainstream player like Slingbox bringing it to the masses.
From TG Daily
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