Home plugs can help share your internet connection

As many people are aware, you can share your internet connection through your WiFi ADSL router box. This WiFi ADSL box gives you WiFi connection possibilities throughout your home - or at least to a range of about 100 meters and three internal walls. Some people fear WiFi for reasons of security or they may even fear low levels of radio radiation.

WiFi is also facing a new challenge: modern building thermal insulation standards. Cheap thermal insulation building materials are foil backed. Foil is really good at bouncing back any WiFi signals causing your WiFi network to be unable to travel from room to room or from room to outside your home. You maybe unaware of this because the foil thermal barrier is inside the external walls of your home. If you suffer from this you can quickly get a good idea by looking at your mobile cell phone signal strength while you walk among external windows and the internal doors. Foil radio shielding will appear as strong radio signal strength by the window which quickly fades as you go behind your external walls.

The security concerns of WiFi are proper and valid but it is still unknown if the radio waves themselves have a medically damaging influence on some people who may be sensitive to such radio radiation. Some schools are known to banish WiFi if only one child is susceptible to the radio waves. You can argue that this is fair and reasonable so long as alternate ways of internet sharing are possible.

There are some reasonable and cost effective alternatives to WiFi. WiFi is cheap and flexible because it does not use copper cables for its transmission. We normally have copper cables surrounding us everywhere - the mains electricity power points.

It's possible to safely have the mains electricity cables to carry your internet connection between rooms. This works so long as the mains wiring uses the same phase of the electricity. In a normal domestic home there is only one supply cable coming in and this supplies one single phase of electricity for the whole house. The Ethernet home plug adaptors inject high frequency signals along the wires in the same way as ADSL injects high frequency signals across audio copper phone lines. When paired, such adaptors share a channel of signals so that they can communicate together and carry network signals over the mains wiring.

Mains based local area networks work like any other network once you connect to the standard RJ45 network socket. You can choose to connect a simple four or eight port network box to share the connection locally behind your television, personal video recorder or at your home office desk. You can even get home plug adaptors with multiple hub connections already built in.

The best thing about these plugs is their safety. If you want to extend your internet connection to an outhouse or garage then they offer real safety benefits. Should you use traditional Ethernet cabling you may expose the wires to external elements such as lightning. With mains cabling you probably have the cable protected already and the cable will carry an earth wire as well. This protects the electronic circuits against peak lightning spikes. The mains earth cabling will have the effect of dampening the lightning spikes during a storm.

The efficiency of mains Ethernet signal transmission will be effected by the core size of the house wires as well as the appliances connected to your house mains. If you use lightning protection strips, or extensions, on your mains electrical outlets then some of the transmission will be soaked up by the capacitors inside of these extensions. Ordinary domestic appliances may incorporate some mains spike protection. You may expect this in some earthed appliances such as HD televisions and washing machines which need to protect their internal electronics and on board computers.

Home plugs are a truly adaptable and an effective way to extend your internet network without raising any cause for concern about WiFi signal transmission.