Linked by JoanneRodgers on Thu 15th May 2008 23:02 UTC
In a June 2003 Wired Magazine interview, Martha Stewart said, "Bill Gates' house, for example, is totally out of date now. He built it right before wireless happened. The big tunnels for all his wires - he doesn't need any of that stuff anymore." The article wasn't about networking, or even technology, but I was struck by that statement because it was echoed by several people when I was explaining that I was running many thousands of feet of cable in OSNews' "house of the future." "Is all that cable really necessary now that there's wireless everything?" people said. As much as I respect Martha Stewart's business and design acumen, neither she, nor those people who talked to me, know what they're talking about. When it comes to networking, there's no substitute for a wire, when a wire's available. -- This is the latest entry in our 2008 Article Contest. 
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Powerline networking is the way to go for things like security cameras. Just hook them up anywhere there is A/C and you're done. Powerline is plenty fast enough for cameras.
A very important point that is being missed. Powerline and wireless are shared medium networks. Shared medium means there is only one 802.11N wireless channel available. Start using this single channel for HDTV and everything is going to suffer. Don't believe the eleven wireless channels, there are only three non-overlapping 802.11g channels; 11N stomps on all three. And your neighbors stomp on you too.
Modern Ethernet is switched. This makes a tremendous difference in bandwidth. Each pair of devices is getting a dedicated 1GB channel. Watching HDTV off from a media server is not going to impact your web surfing.
Trivia - powerline networking uses exactly the same modulation techniques as 802.11g/n.