Coming up on hands-on tech, let's do it. Let's talk about the pros and cons of powerline networking. Stay tuned.

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Hello and welcome to Hands On Tech, the show where I, Micah Sargent, take your tech questions and answer them.

What a novel idea.

I am here today to talk to you about something near and so not dear to my heart.

It's all about power line networking.

This question comes in from Lance, who writes, what are the pros and cons of

using powerline Ethernet adapters? So let's first talk about Powerline Ethernet adapters if you

haven't heard of them. When someone is looking at different ways to kind of extend their

internet connection in their home, their network within their home.

Many people who have wireless routers, right, will turn to a router extender or router repeater.

And these are devices that you'll be familiar with as something that you plug into the wall somewhere and it'll have one or two antenna on it.

And it essentially is taking the Wi-Fi signal that your router is putting out, grabbing

it and then extending it to another part of the house. It can do that wirelessly. Some of

them have a little Ethernet cord on the side, a little port on the side, and so you can run

your main Wi-Fi router, the router itself. You can run from the back of it or the front

of it, wherever your ports are, a cord to that

extender, and then that can serve as a further kind of Wi-Fi access point in the home.

It's equivalent to an access point, right?

Some people aren't able to do that for different reasons, and so they need to turn to a different

technology for being able to extend the networking in their home. And something that's been

around for a while is power line network adapters.

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