Hercules ePlug 200 Powerline Adaptor Review

Are your computers too far from your wireless router to get a strong network signal? Mike Agerbo shows you how you can overcome this problem by use your home's electrical network to share an internet connection to any room in the house with the Hercules ePlug 200 powerline adaptor.

This is kind of cool, I'm actually watching some home movies, but I'm streaming them wirelessly from a different location. Right now I have an Apple TV box hooked up to my big screen TV and its taking a feed off of my upstairs home media server which is essentially a big hard drive. What it’s doing is sending all these video information wirelessly using wifi, wireless. And in this particular case right to the box. The challenge though in this particular home, I just haven’t been able to get a good strong signal to transmit the video in a really clear fashion. You can see right now as you're watching it, it’s kind of stopping and jerking. It’s not getting a clear signal from the wifi router upstairs down to this particular box. Well on those types of situations, there are other alternatives. You can either have your whole house rewired with network cabling which is very expensive and messy. Or you could try power line adaptors and this is kind of a cool little technology. These are called the Hercules ePlug, this particular one is rated at a 200 megabit speed which ideally will work with things like video and also HD video. And what were going to do is actually use the existing electrical wiring in the house as our network wiring. It’s kind of a crazy thing, but, all that electrical wiring is made out of copper and it actually transmits internet traffic quite well. What we want to do is hook up one of these plugs to the network enabled device whether that’s a media center, an Apple TV, a computer, or even a video game console like an XBox or a Playstation. And then we want to take the other one and hook it up near the actual router where were sharing the internet connection. And they also typically comes with some Ethernet cabling. On the bottom, basically plug in the network cable. See I've got the power outlet in the back here. I'm going to move the TV to get access to the actual power. Once I have that plugged in, I still have the other network cable. And here's the Apple TV box. I do have a network outlet. The next step I want to do is now set this whole thing up with the router upstairs. Okay, so were upstairs here, this is where we’ve got our cable modem and our handy dandy router. And in the interest of time, I've already got a cable plugged in here that I'm not going to use for the ePlug. Next step is to plug this into the power outlet and into the Ethernet cable outlet hook up to the router. So here is the closest power outlet, and again it has to be plug directly into the wall. You can't plug this into a power bar. Plug the Ethernet cable that’s going to the router. Simply plug it in to the wall and you can see we got a few lights going here. Once all of them basically go green, were pretty well good to go. I'm going to be honest, this is probably one of the easiest power line adaptors that I've setup. Usually there's a whole bunch of software you have to go through to make them work. But this one here, you don’t even have to go to the software, it just kind of automatically works. If you do want a little more security, you can go to the installation assistant and setup a little password for each one of these adaptors. That’s the nice thing, you can actually setup adaptors in every room that you want to have network or internet to. This is pretty cool, were using the electrical wiring in the house to transmit network traffic. Actual video. And as you can see on the screen right now, we solved the video stuttering problem. You know, 9 times out of 10 wifi networks are great for streaming video but if you do run in to any of this type of problems. You might want to check out these power adaptors, network power adaptors, as an alternative solution. The one were using again from Hercules, it’s their ePlug system. This one is rated at 200 megabit, so great for streaming high bandwidth traffic like video and a good alternative to ripping your walls apart to put wiring in or a bad wifi network.