Netgear extends wireless reach with power-line technology.

Even the smallest house can suffer dead spots on a wireless network because of obstacles such as building materials, wall mirrors and furniture placement. Meanwhile, power outlets live in abundance in most areas of the home, making HomePlug power line networking an attractive, although largely overlooked, alternative.

Netgear combined these two technologies with its 54M bit/sec Wall-Plugged Wireless Range Extender Kit , a two-device package that aims to fill wireless network gaps with power-line network connectivity. We tested the package to see whether it could enhance our wireless network and work with our network equipment.

The first device is a power-line adapter and bridge (Model XE102), which plugs into a power outlet and connects to your router via Ethernet cable. The second device (WGX102 ) is the "wireless range extender," which plugs into an outlet in the dead spot area and acts as an access point.

Our first task was to find an appropriate dead spot. Our home is no mansion, and generally we've been getting good coverage. The access point sits on the first floor, so reaching up to the second floor and down to the basement isn't difficult.

Wall-Plugged Wireless Range Extender Kit

Price: $149 Installation time: Between 30 minutes and two hours (depending on network). Ongoing maintenance: Some maintenance required. Bottom line: Don’t try this unless you’re on a homogeneous Netgear network.

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Our basement still provided about 57% signal strength, which prompted us to do a little neighborhood war driving to find the outer edges of the current network. Not only did we discover that our network could reach a few neighbors' houses, but we also discovered that many neighbors are running unprotected networks without changing the SSIDs from the default setting.

Nevertheless, once plugged in, the second device (WGX102) is supposed to extend the range of the existing wireless network by providing additional wireless coverage. This sounds good in theory, but in practice we ran into several problems.

First, the Netgear device didn't play nicely with our Linksys router. Instead of providing a feature that would automatically grab an IP address from a DHCP server, it comes with a static IP address in a different range (Netgear uses 192.168.0.x; Linksys uses 192.168.1.x). To configure the wall-plug access point, we had to change the IP address on our wireless laptop to match the Netgear range.

Once we did that, we could configure the wall-plug adapter, but each setting change (such as adding wireless security) meant we had to re-associate with the access point each time. When we gave the access point a static IP address within the range of our Linksys router, the adapter still couldn't get an Internet connection. Checking the router, the IP address we had assigned the adapter didn't show up on its DHCP table; and because we had changed it from the original Netgear address, we now couldn't connect to the adapter to make any more changes. Luckily, Netgear adds a reset button on the wall adapter.