No, I'm not that Bryan Robson...

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Breaking News:We're ranked #1 on Ask.com for "obscenely comfy seating"! I'm so proud...

I've just bought the Netgear Wall-Plugged HD Ethernet Starter Kit from Novatech (the product page is here). For the first time since I've been using them I was bit disappointed in Novatech's service: the website showed 8 in stock available to collect from Reading withing 24 hours, and it stayed that way until I got the email telling me it was available to collect, 4 working days later. I know it's only a few days more, but it annoys me that the stock availability message was inaccurate. I'm sure it won't stop me using them, mind you...

Anyway, the kit contains a pair of HDX101 ethernet-over-powerline adapters. The HD part of the name is meant to tell you that they can provide enough bandwidth for streaming high-def movies, as the adapters have a (theoretical) maximum speed of 200Mbps.

I had been finding that while I could stream standard def movies over my wifi link, high def was impossible, and it's just not practical to route ethernet cable between my office (where the ADSL line comes in, and the Windows Home Server sits) and the living room, so I thought I'd give the latest generation of powerline adapters a go.

I have to say I'm impressed. Set-up is mindlessly easy: just plug them in and you're away. High def (720p) movies are streaming flawlessly - I haven't got any 1080p movies to try, but when I get hold of something I'll give it a go.

The control panel app included on the installation CD allows you to check the speeds you're getting, and it's showing that I'm getting 72Mbps from my server to my laptop, and 54Mbps in the other direction. Yes, this is a lot less than the notional 200Mbps, but then I'm not using gigabit ethernet yet, so my maximum was always going to be 100Mbps anyway. Since gigabit switches have become so cheap these days I'll probably pick one up and see if that makes a difference - though I'll need a new card in my homeserver as the on-board network card is 10/100.

The control panel app also allows you to set QoS priority, even to the level of selecting a specific port, so if you're using it mainly for streaming media you can tune it to match. The default setting appeared to be priority for UDP, which seems fine so far for me.

When copying a large file from a WHS share to my Vista laptop I was getting speeds of 3MB/s reported by TeraCopy, which isn't exactly blazing, but still better than I got over wireless. I can probably get that rate up with QoS tuning, but I'll not bother as it will mainly be used for media streaming anyway.

So: highly recommended!