For most households, it would be unthinkable, unless you were designing your home on plan, to consider having a network enabling you to position two or more computers and peripherals anywhere in your home so that they could be linked.
Think of all the trunking you would need, plus all the new sockets spread all over the place. So, if you had a computer in the study, you would not be able to network with one in the kids' bedroom or another room in your home. Well, not any more.
Packard Bell, the consumer brand of NEC Computers, represented in Malta by Forestals, have done just that - enabled you to create a home network through your existing electricity system thanks to an ingenious device called net2plug.
A typical net2plug starter pack consists of two PLC USB modules that literally plug into an electricity socket, two USB cables and a comprehensive software package that enables you to 'plug and play' to configure the system with a set of applications to transfer all data safely from one PC to another as well as to protect data.
To get the system running, all you need to do is install the software on the first computer, then plug in. The USB cable links the wall plug to the USB plug in your computer and then you do the same with the second computer.
No specialised knowledge is needed and you can literally have the system 'live' within half an hour. Among the benefits of this PLC technology are:
¤ flexibility (users can place their computers anywhere in the home);
¤ reliability with full coverage in the household;
¤ security (56-bit DES link encryption with key management);
¤ multiple wireless and mobile applications (Ethernet and Wi-Fi PLC modules will be available later this year);
¤ high speed transmission (14Mbps today and 200Mbps foreseen later this year, allowing full video streaming); and
¤ affordable price (the all-in-one starter pack costs under Lm100).
The software starter pack includes the award-winning network game Race Simulation 3 by UbiSoft, so you can put your networking to use straight away.
But from a practical point of view, you can print on a printer that is connected to another computer in another location to the one you are working on in your home and also link to the Internet through more than one computer, apart from sharing files, music, pictures and videos between computers.
The net2plug home networking system is the first to come from Packard Bell, who promise more similar useful home networking innovations.