NETGEAR XE102 Wall-Plugged Ethernet Bridge Review

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(More customer reviews)I tested these between the two units in a duplex apartment building. Each apartment has its own electrical meter and main panel, although they share the same 240Volt service from the street. Result: Works great! The speeds varied slightly depending on the outlets into which these were plugged, but were always much faster than my 3 Mb/s cable modem connection, and were also consistently faster than 802.11b wireless. Supposedly, the connection quality is not limited by distance, and the signal travels just fine across circuit breakers, fuses, and even between the two 120V legs of a 240V service connection, as I confirmed. In a big building, or one with many obstructions, wireless is a hit-or-miss solution, whereas this seems to be rock-solid.

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The NETGEAR XE102 Wall-Plugged Ethernet Bridge lets you easily extend a network using just the existing electric lines of your home, eliminating the need to run unsightly Ethernet wires all over your house or apartment.
True Plug and Play Installation To extend a network using the electric lines in your home, you need two XE102 units. Simply plug one of them into a wall outlet and connect it to your router with an Ethernet cord. Plug the second one into any wall outlet that is electrically connected to the first and you have an instant Ethernet port to plug a computer, gaming console, or other networkable device with an RJ-45 Ethernet plug. You can create as many network connections as you need by connecting more XE102 units. The device has easy-to-read icon LEDs for status information at a glance.
The XE102 has a 10BASE-T Ethernet jack and supports the 10 Mbps HomePlug 1.0 standard. It uses Forward Error Correction (FEC) and Automatic channel adaptation to ensure the integrity of the data. In order to enable encryption, you need a computer with Windows XP, 2000, ME or 98.
The NETGEAR XE102 Wall-Plugged Ethernet Bridge is backed by a 3-year warranty.
What's in the Box XE102 Wall-Plugged Ethernet Bridge, installation guide, Ethernet cable, resource CD, and warranty/support information card.

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Cisco-Linksys WMB54G Wireless-G Music Bridge Review

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(More customer reviews)First off, a little background... I consider myself fairly skilled at using computers.. I have been using them for 25+ years and have installed operating systems, configured routers, set up wireless networks, recovered systems from virus crashes, etc. Reading the below reviews I thought that while installing the music bridge might be a bit tricky, I could handle it.
WOW. I don't know where to begin. This product has the worst documentation I've ever seen, both in the box and online. I spent 10+ hours getting this to work on my system, plus another hour un-doing damage to my system registry after the Music Bridge driver conflicted with another driver in my system and caused a crash.
Having said that, I finally have it up and running and it is operating as promised, though using 100% of my CPU power and thus causing the computer to run very slowly.
Reading the support forum on the linksys site, the people that have the fewest problems installing this equipment are those that don't have routers. Ironically, though Linksys (and Cisco) are router companies, the instructions do not include the special steps that must be taken to re-configure your router so it will connect with the bridge.
Be warned - this is not plug and play and you may very well spend a lot of frustrating time trying to get it to work. Once it is working there are many idiosyncracies (eg having to close and open your music player to get it to play through the bridge) that you would not expect from a well-designed piece of hard/software.
This is a bargain for a reason - I'd suggest you spend a little more and find something better. Good luck!!

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You're having a party, but you don't have the time it will take to burn a disc of your favorite digital tunes. This is where the Linksys WMB54G Wireless-G Music Bridge comes in. By letting you wirelessly stream audio files from your PC to your stereo or other speaker system, no matter which music service you use, the Wireless-G Music Bridge gives you all the convenience of digital music with the sound of high-performance stereo.With the Wireless-G Music Bridge, you can send whatever music your PC is playing--whether it's from media players, games, Internet radio, orMP3 files--through your home network and to your stereo system. If you're running a wireless (802.11b and 802.11g) network, the Music Bridge will send your music to your stereo with no need for any additional cables. Simply connect the Wireless-G Music Bridge to your entertainment system via the included RCA cable, and you'll be ready to start cranking the tunes. Alternately, you can also use standard 10/100 Ethernet cabling to connect to your network.If you have a 5.1-channel surround sound system, the Wireless-G Music Bridge includes software that creates a virtual 5.1-channel sound in your PC, so that you can take full advantage of your stereo system. The Wireless-G Music Bridge also lets you choose what audio from your PC you want to play over your audio system. For example, you can choose to send music but not email alerts or other PC tones. Or you may want to keep the alert tones streaming. It's entirely up to you.An easy-to-use setup wizard will guide you through the configuration so that you can be up and running in no time. The Wireless-G Music Bridge supports 128-bit WEP encryption to ensure a secure connection and is compatible with wireless 802.11b and 802.11g standards.What's in the Box Wireless-G Music Bridge, Ethernet network cable, stereo RCA cable, power adapter, setup wizard CD-ROM, user guide on CD-ROM, and quick installation guide.

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