Sling Media Release Ethernet-Over-Powerline Adaptor

If I were building my own house then I'd have hidden rooms behind bookcases, a dungeon and a room especially for teleconferencing – oh, and ethernet ports all over the place.  It's a fact of life that as our lives get more and more computer-dependent, the means to connect the gadgets up become trickier.  Wireless salves some problems, yes, but there's no denying the stability (and security) of wired connections, especially when it comes to bandwidth hungry applications like streaming media.  Sling Media, makers of the lovely SlingBox, recognise that not everyone has an RJ-45 socket by their TV, and so they've come up with their own ethernet-over-powerline adaptors.

Of course, being Sling Media they don't just expect you to plug some ugly little box into your AC socket – they've given the SlingTurbo the same slick corporate look as the rest of the media place-shifting range, and are claiming to have gifted it the historic easy-setup of their products.

Plug a one-port SlingTurbo into a wall-socket near your router, hook up the single ethernet cable, then plug in the second, four-port (or one-port if you're cheap) SlingTurbo into a wall-socket near your TV and, of course, the SlingBox attached to it.  Switch on and everything sets itself up – it uses the same 1.0 Turbo spec as other HomePlug devices, making it inter-operable with products from different manufacturers and good for a theoretical 85Mbps data rate.

The single-port unit is priced at $99.99 while the four-port unit is $149.99 – both are available now.

SlingTurbo [via eHomeUpgrade]