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Problems Remain for Power-Line Nets

As Intelogis leaves the retail home LAN business, is the technology really a contender?

By Eric Bender, PCWorld   

Under the new name of Inari, it will shift efforts away from its 350-kilobit-per-second PassPort Plug-In Network kit. Instead the company will concentrate on developing its technology for other vendors, planning a 2-megabit-per-second chip set by midyear and a 10-mbps version by yearend.

This news is mixed for one customer: me.

Over the holidays, I set up a PassPort network to give my family shared Internet access. And it works fine--sometimes.

A LAN with Rough Terrain

This was basically a tale of two PCs. The one with the cable modem is in my study on the second floor. The other is in the sunroom on the first floor.

We would have done fine with dialup Internet access. But there are no phone lines in the sunroom, and installing one would have required an electrician with a very long drill and a lot of spare time. So much for that--and for the Home PhoneLine Networking Alliance LANs that work, well, over phone lines.

And while wireless network adapters sound ideal, they cost around $200 a pop.

Enter PassPort, priced at $80 with enough adapters for two PCs and a printer. It's not nearly as fast as the other options, but that was basically irrelevant. It also has a reputation for fickle behavior (no small achievement in a Windows world). Performance depends on your house's electrical system, and most of the wiring in my house apparently was done by deranged elves.

Easy Install, But?

Setting up PassPort was a breeze. You attach a parallel cable from PC or printer to each adapter (a white block the size of a fist) and then plug it into an outlet. The software installed without problem, although you do (as warned) need your Windows 98 upgrade disc. I couldn't initially see both PCs, but they appeared after I changed the Windows security defaults to allow printer sharing (let the Dark Hacker Lords do as they will with my ink jet). I ran a wizard to add network security. Adding Internet access, via the bundled aVert Gateway Server, was even simpler.

Once the network was installed, I turned on the sunroom PC. Voila! Up popped Yahoo. Some quick tests showed quite good performance, with file downloads cruising along at about 100 kbps.

But when I tried showing it to my wife that evening, the elves struck. The two PCs couldn't find each other no matter what I did.

After much fiddling with hardware and software, and consultation with tech support, I find myself with something best described as a random area network. Sometimes PassPort works, sometimes it doesn't.

It seems to do better in the daytime, before the neighbors who share the closest power transformer come home and rev up their appliances. But it can get a fit of the sulks anytime.

I'm not mad at Intelogis (whoops, Inari). The product is nicely designed, the software works, the tech support folks were prompt and did their best. I'm told that PassPort does work fine for most customers. And I'll keep the network because it's so handy when it does work.

But the company is meddling with forces it can't really control--the problem looks like basic technology rather than packaging. And the move to higher bandwidths seems premature.

At some point you no longer can blame the elves.