Hi, I've been asked to look into powerline products for my house mates, before we move into our new house in September. We are all university computing students, so having a good connection is very important to us. There are five of us moving into a three story house. The phone socket is in the living room on the ground floor.

Two of us don't mind using wireless, but this means that the router needs to be on the middle floor, otherwise the guy on the top floor will have a poor connection. The rest of us (One in a bedroom from each floor), would like to be wired into the router. This is where powerline sounded like an ace idea.

However, I've not been able to find out much about powerline products at all, and I'm still confused as to how many plugs we would need, or even if the connection will be any quicker than wireless.

I can't decide between needing 4 or 5 plugs at the moment. Because the guy on the middle floor with the router in his room might need 1 or 2 plugs. As he needs the router to connect to a plug on the ground floor living room (where the phone socket is). But also needs to put another cable into the wall to give the rest of us internet? Or maybe I'm way off, and we need two cables coming out of the router, into two plugs, received by two more in the last two bedrooms, with a third going to the living room. I'm quite confused, and I'm sure that my description is even more confusing. Can anyone help me out?

I was considering these They have upto 200mbps and although you may think well the router nics may be 10/100 only etc the fact is on the 85mbps versions you only get about half of that, so if the 200mb version gets 50% your still good!

Be warey of the cheaper/unknown brands a lot of them when you read the average data speeds are really low, slower than wifi!

In the end I used one of these and one of these on the media center for HD streaming. The gaming PC's and the WHS are Gigabit Wired, and the laptops are standard.

Whatever you decide on, dont be cheap!