Home Networking

We use our home as a testbed for home networking technologies.

We have evaluated wireless and powerline networking at selected locations in our house. Please see the test locations page for a diagram of our house showing the locations we have used for testing.

Structured Cabling

We installed structured cabling nearly seven years ago, and use it for high-speed Ethernet networking between our PCs and for SIP telephony. Please see the description of our structured cabling installation for more information on our cabling infrastructure.

Homeplug Powerline Networking

During July and August of 2002, we conducted an extensive evaluation of HomePlug powerline networking equipment. In development for many years, this equipment is just coming to market. We summarized the results of our testing in several articles in BBHR. The HomePlug pages of our website contain references to those articles plus additional details on the equipment we tested, our testing procedure and results, and our conclusions.

We use our HomePlug network to connect our networked audio player to our PC jukebox.

Wireless

We have had 802.11 (first) and 802.11b (Wi-Fi) access points for several years. We have used our portable PCs with wireless LAN cards at locations (such as our wine cellar and our garden) where we don't have Ethernet jacks.

We're now evaluating Wi-Fi access points and PC Cards in our home the same way we tested HomePlug. We're measuring range and speed for three "flavors" of Wi-Fi: 802.11b, 802.11a and the brand-new 802.11g version. Please see our test results on the Wi-Fi pages of our website.

HONEST: HOme NEtworking Speed Test

We created a program -- HONEST: HOme NEtworking Speed Test -- to evaluate and compare the performance of HomePlug and other home networking technologies. We have published the source code of the program as a service to the broadband home community.