Network buying guide

With so many options, which network set-up is best for you?
What equipment you buy relies on a few things — the speed you expect, how neat you are, the configuration of your house and the materials used to build it, as well as interference.

Speeds: everybody lies

Most networking devices are rated for a specific speed in megabits or kilobits per second. These numbers are often over-inflated to appeal to customers — they don't actually represent the maximum throughput (how much data can be sent over the connection per second), just the maximum raw data rate. Think of it as a theoretical maximum that sadly, you'll never achieve — and always look for those magical words "up to".

There are many factors that can affect the speed of network devices: underpowered networking equipment, low quality cabling, interference, storage speed limits of individual devices, even overheads that are generated as a side effect of adding network code.

In the table below we've listed the known networking equipment theoretical speeds, transmission distances and the actual speeds you can expect to get out of them in a best-case scenario. Note for wireless speeds, vendors tend to rate their equipment with aggregate speeds — the total amount of bandwidth that can be sent out to multiple clients. For our "actual speed" though, we've given what you can expect as a single user to see under the best possible scenario, but be aware with wireless it can always get worse depending on distance, interference and hardware used.

There's ways to avoid this, of course — you could build cables into the wall if you're building or expanding your house. They'd need to be properly terminated using a flush mount wall plate and RJ45 modular jacks (sometimes also called mechs or "connector mechanisms" — regardless, manufacturers Clipsal, Krone and HPM are the usual suspects for this sort of gear) which you can pick up from your local John R Turk or Middy's if you're a DIY kind of person; but while this will likely work fine, legally in Australia you're required to have a licensed cabler do, or at least observe, the installation. In a lot of cases, the electrician doing the power cabling will be qualified to do this work for you.

Cabling in between walls and using proper mounting plates and mechs can make networking as unobtrusive as power sockets. (Credit: Clipsal)

Alternatively, as a halfway house you could look into Ethernet over power devices (often called "Homeplugs" or "powerline adapters") — which use the power lines in your walls to transmit network signals. This should cut down on trip hazards, requiring cables only to be used to connect the short distance between the home plug and PC, games console or other networked device. Just be warned that performance will vary greatly from house to house, room to room.

For convenient casual internet and network access though, wireless is your best bet — although in today's home, the truth is you're likely to have a mixture of networking technologies to fit all needs.

So which solution best fits you?