Personally we feel the technology that Powerline brings to the market is as exciting as Satellite Navigation devices did a year or so ago.

There are several advantages of using Powerline over standard Wifi connectivity, the first is security, as mainly the only concern you have over somebody or something breaking into your network is the people physically inside the same building, where as over -the-air wireless is potentially hackable from the outside (public domain).

Secondly the devices are not as vulnerable to interference and you tend to get a more stable bandwidth, where Wifi in our opinion is a hit and miss affair, with intermittent drop outs which can cause downloads to fail.

Of course Powerline technology is not without its faults as you need to use a dedicated mains point and the devices will draw additional power, with the more electrical appliances running in your building affecting the performance.

However with the Edimax home network kit we review here you will find the benefits outclass the disadvantages.

The home network kit comprises of two 85mbps Powerline boxes, 2 x RJ45 cables (about 1.8metres in length), 1 x manual and a CD with utilities.

To be honest you don't even need the CD as the installation is a piece of cake. Plug in one of the Powerline boxes into your mains point (it states not to use power strips but some people have had success with these), then attach the RJ45 cable to your broadband connection, take the second Powerline plug and connect it into another main point, then take the RJ45 lead from this and plug it into your PC or console.

As long as your broadband or PC has been configured previously you will find there is nothing else for you to do but sit back and relax.

If you decide to use the CD it will give you a utility for configuring a password, a diagnostic tool for checking out problems and a status page so you can see how well your Powerline device is performing.

From our buildings 40 year old mains supply we were getting an average speed of 67mbps and we even swapped the supplied 1.8metere RJ45 cable with a 20 meter cable (so there was even more chance for interference to affect the speed).

In real world tests we downloaded a 400mb file without the connection dropping once and we got the same download speeds as if we were directly connected to our broadband box.

We then switched to Call of Duty 4 to see how the Powerline device would hold up in a rigorous online gaming session and we were getting pings ranging from 41 to 67, so no probs here either. Note: the pings could be lower or higher depending on the server you are playing on.

Of course the Powerline solution can get quite expensive if you have multiple devices you want to connect and its here that over the-air Wifi works out cheaper, but its still a great solution none the less.

• Supports IEEE 802.3 and IEEE 802.3u Ethernet Standards
• Supports 85Mbps High Speed Data Rate Powerline 1.0 Standards
• Othogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing for High Data Reliability in Noisy Media Conditions
• Fast Speed for DVD-Quality Video Streaming
• Supports 56-bit DES Link Encryption to secure Powerline data transmission.
• Provide coverage up to 200 metres