Since I started working on the Ubuntu project, the amount of hardware located in my home office seems to have grown on a weekly basis.
I had been getting by with a old 100MBps switch connected to my iMac which acted as a gateway onto the main wireless network in the house for the infrastructure that I use for testing Ubuntu Server; however the iMac gateway kept disabling itself and the performance was not great.
So last weekend I bit the bullet and ordered myself a pair of ZyXEL powerline adapters and a Netgear Gigabit network switch from e-buyer.
By 1245 on Monday I had a new home network – the setup was so easy it was ridiculous; the powerline adapters automatically connected to each other as soon as I plugged them in and the Netgear switch was more than happy to chat to my BT HomeHub 2 through them with zero config.
Now that my office is completely hard-wired to my Internet connection latency seems to be much better (think that my BT HomeHub was a little overloaded) and the gigabit connectivity between devices is certainly helping with performance (I run a local Ubuntu archive cache using apt-cacher-ng to avoid using my Internet connection as much as possible).
Shame I only have a 5.5MBps Internet connection; and living in rural Norfolk I can’t see BT Infinity reaching me anytime soon…
