Solwise HomePlug Ethernet Turbo review

If you live in a modern house, then setting up a wireless network will easily allow you to share files, printers and a broadband connection among two or more PCs.

If, on the other hand, you live in an old house, you probably won't be able to broadcast a usable wireless signal through all that stone, brick and plaster.

The Solwise HomePlus allows you to build a PC network using the mains electricity loop in your home. Installation is simple - using the supplied Ethernet network cable, every PC you want to network needs to be connected to a HomePlug adapter, which is plugged directly into a wall socket. You then run the software provided on each PC. The utility program finds the adapter plugged into the PC it's running on, and all the other adapters plugged into the mains elsewhere in the building. We expected the devices to work properly only when plugged into a router, or some other piece of hardware capable of assigning them network addresses. In fact, they worked well without any outside intervention. Even when Windows was displaying warning messages telling us that our network wasn't working properly, we could access all the PCs connected via HomePlug.

Securing your network

To get a PC on to the network, you have to know the network's name. This is more or less the only security function available - apart

from the ability to isolate a computer completely from all the other systems on the network by pressing a single software button. This is only really useful if you suspect you're in the process of being hacked. As the mains loop on many houses is a closed circuit, however, most people don't need to worry too much about security.

Connection speed came out at around 10Mbit/s in

our tests. This is nowhere near the advertised speed of 85Mbit/s. That's not really a surprise - the standard transfer speeds of all network devices tend to be what the industry calls "theoretical maximums". This is annoying, but it would be unfair to single out Solwise for the practice when everyone does it. On the other hand, this is still a middling performance. It's still more than fast enough to share broadband or move files around between PCs, though.

Our only major reservation about this product was the price - you only get one adapter for £42. You can get a good broadband router with built-in modem for about £60, so we don't really understand why this is so expensive.