All Hubs & switches Feeds

Apple AirPort Express

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With very little fanfare, Apple finally upgraded the last of its WiFi products still to be using 802.11g to the faster and wider-coverage standard, 802.11n.

Actually, 802.11g is still technically the current standard, as 802.11n is yet to be formally ratified, but it's sufficiently well developed that we're comfortable recommending it; in any case, the firmware is upgradeable, so when the standard is finally agreed on, full compliance should only be a download away.

Apart from the upgrade to 802.11n, nothing has changed that we can see, but that doesn't mean it isn't a welcome revision. 802.11n is faster - a theoretical maximum of 248Mb/sec compared to 802.11g's 54Mb/sec - and can have a greater range, often using multiple antennae to shape the coverage to suit the local environment.

Upgrade to 802.11n

The move to n is welcome, too, if you're already trying to deploy an n network but want to include an AirPort Express.

Because while many products on the market can do most of what the Express does, it's still unique in offering AirTunes, the ability to stream music wirelessly from iTunes to a pair of speakers or a stereo system.

If you had an 802.11n router and 802.11n Macs, adding the pre-upgrade, 802.11g AirPort Extreme would have slowed your whole network down. Now, n networks can include AirTunes without the bottleneck of a g device.

And it's worth it for AirTunes. You can password-protect your speakers so that nobody starts blasting James Blunt out of them without your say-so, and as well as streaming to specific speakers, if you buy multiple AirPort Expresses and link them all into the same network you can check which ones you want to stream to, potentially sending the same audio to every room in your house.

The jack for speakers is a dual analog and optical output, so it will connect to pretty much everything.

Network across your home

The idea of blanketing your entire house with AirPort Expresses on the same network is entirely feasible, not just because the unit itself is quite cheap, but because multiple devices can be linked together to strengthen and extend the range of your wireless network.

It's important to note that if you have a non-Apple device at the heart of your network - a Netgear modem/router that's connected to the internet, for example - this bridging mode may not work off the bat.

Though the Wireless Distribution System (WDS) used isn't an Apple-specific technology, some reports suggest that sullying a pure Apple network with a PC can be fraught with wireless configuration problems.

AirPort Express or Extreme?

Apart from the cost and AirTunes, however, there's no reason to buy the AirPort Express rather than its big brother, the AirPort Extreme. The Extreme enables more computers to connect wirelessly - 50 rather than 10 - and includes three Ethernet ports so that you can network computers using cables.

Wired networks are faster and inherently more secure than wireless ones, though, of course, the Extreme and Express support WEP, WPA and WPA2 encryption standards.

And while the AirPort Express can share a printer with Macs and even PCs on the network, the AirPort Extreme can also share disks in the same way.

Making hard disks available to other computers on your home network might not be your number one priority, but remember that this lack of disk sharing means that, unlike with the AirPort Extreme, you won't be able to use the AirPort Express to do Time Machine backups to a network disk.

Run on Windows with ease

The AirPort Utility - which runs on Windows as well as OS X - makes setting up an absolute breeze, and means that no matter whether computers on your network are running Windows or OS X, you can manage or join networks created by an AirPort Express, stream music and share printers - all with consummate ease.

Aside from this, we continue to be frustrated by Apple's insistence on omitting an ADSL or cable modem from its wireless access points - how much better it would be to have a one-box solution that takes up one socket and draws one supply of power - but this is still a great little device for the money.

If your networking needs are modest, it's everything you need to create a future-proof WiFi network, and AirTunes is a great and unique wireless trick. Look to the AirPort Extreme or the new Time Capsule for more meaty streaming solutions.

Akasa Combo USB Hub

tech.co.uk staff — 1204818434

With the ever-growing number of memory card formats available, having a reader that is able to handle them all is growing increasingly necessary.

The Akasa Combo goes that little bit further by adding three USB 2.0 ports to the line-up, making it a hub as well. As it's available in a range of colours, you can pick one to match your laptop or home setup.

You'll find support for 11 different card types, in all their formats, including T-Flash (Micto CD). The only card it won't support is the xD-Picture card, which is increasingly common in digital cameras.

Supplied with a sleeve, you can take the reader on the move with you, but when self-powered it runs at USB 1.1 speed, so isn't ideal for transferring large files. However, the power supply does offer full 40Mbps speeds from the USB 2.0 ports.

Solwise 200AV HomePlug Adapter

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The interesting part about wireless technology is that it represents one of the few situations where technology has overtaken the hardware available.

Home networks are coming under constant demands, having to deal with media streaming, home servers, high definition... and thick walls.

Stream hi-def around your home

With no ratification of wireless N in sight it appears that powerline networking - the art of using your home electrical ring to carry your Internet - is the key.

Solwise has now come to the fore with its 200Mbps powerline product, which is designed to get all those high-definition videos, files for backing up and your consoles games zipping around your home like never before.

Note that for Solwise to eek 200Mbps out of the HomePlugs, it would have had to connect devices using 1cm of high-quality copper. You'll never achieve this in your home. We managed to achieve 100Mbps in normal conditions, which is ample for most requirements.

Setting up the Solwise units was simplicity itself. Just plug them in, connect the included ethernet cables to your router and PC respectively, and hit the connection button so the two devices can find each other.

Cheap and simple networking

Solwise has got one more trump card to play. It's looked at how people use powerline sockets and designed them to be the same width as a normal plug. Big deal, you may sneer, but this is a refreshing development.

Most other powerline kits are the size of a breeze-block, which makes connecting them to plug sockets either on the wall or in an extension all but impossible.

The slim design can save you a real headache and makes the competitive price worth it. At £50 each, the Solwise HomePlugs aren't as cheap as the gargantuan D-link Powerline HD at £88 for two, but outstrip the Netgear sockets at £65 each.

Belkin 3-port USB hub and media reader

tech.co.uk staff — 1202132870

Spare USB ports are a precious commodity, rare enough for us to have to buy USB hubs in order to make more of them. And then we plug other USB devices into those hubs and so the chain goes on. All this USB activity draws power, confusion and a tangle of cables over your work area. Wouldn't it be better if you could combine a hub and, say, a popular USB peripheral into one?

Let us introduce to you the Belkin USB 3-port hub and media reader. It's a simple idea: you get three USB ports and a card reader that can accept 15 types of digital camera memory cards. The neat unit sits on your desk and takes up no more space than a dictaphone.

The Belkin unit attaches to a Mac via a small USB 2.0 cable. A glowing red LED signifies that a USB connection has been made with a host port. Next to the USB connector are two USB 2.0 ports that are ideal for connecting a printer or scanner. To the front of the unit are the slots for every type of memory card ever produced. Next to it is another USB 2.0 port, which is perfect for linking up a camera to your Mac or perhaps a thumb drive.

Of course, to power all these devices, it is necessary to have some sort of transformer. Belkin provides one but it is quite small and convenient. That makes a change from the hulking great power bricks that some manufacturers bundle with their mini USB hubs. It's a pity more manufacturers didn't concentrate on both reducing the size and standardising on the type of adaptors they offer. Rant over!

In terms of digital camera memory cards, this device can handle them all: SmartMedia, CompactFlash, Memory Stick, SD, MMC and xD. All variants of these types are catered for so no worries there.

The Belkin 3-port USB hub and 15-in-1 Media Reader (what a mouthful) is a great device and kills two birds with one stone. Mark Sparrow

Belkin Network USB Hub

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We know what you're thinking: "£63 for a USB hub?" However, there's something rather different about this shiny slab. It'll take any standard USB device such as a USB hard drive and make it networkable. Yet where this device really excels is in its ability to make a USB printer accessible from any networked PC, whether wired or wireless.

The hub plugs into your router via Ethernet so it can be shared across your network. There are five USB ports on the device: three at the back and two at the front. Devices are accessed via the Belkin software that you need to install on each of your PCs. And yes, it must be a XP or Vista machine. That could be a problem if you live in a multi-platform household because you won't be able to use the Belkin with a Mac or Linux box.

Seamless use

As for the Ethernet capability, the Network USB Hub is a 10/100Mbps device, so there's no sign of Gigabit Ethernet. While your router is almost certainly not capable of this, your next one will be and with 802.11n proper finally with us this year, a lot of people will be upgrading. It's certainly a feature that we'd have liked to see.

Despite this omission, the device doesn't have a detrimental effect on the user experience, which is nothing less than superb. Accessing the Hub's Control Center displays a list of auto-detected devices attached to the hub. Our Canon printer was up and running in no time and we were printing wirelessly within two minutes of plugging everything in. USB storage auto plays perfectly as if it was connected to the individual machine.

There are a handful of competing products out there, such as Keyspan's USB2 server, but none have really struck home or been any cheaper. Granted, the price does appear expensive for the hardware on offer, but that's not the point. It's what you can do with it that counts.

D-Link DHP-301 Powerline HD Ethernet Kit

tech.co.uk staff — 1185836400

To call power line networking a bandwagon is perhaps too much of a cliché, but debating the lexicon of the English language is irrelevant; more and more networking vendors are jumping onto it. But quite why is a mystery. The core reason for buying a kit that can network non-wirelessly with high throughput is about to fall away with the arrival of 802.11n.

True, wireless is still less than easy to set up and configure, while 802.11n will remain far from established even a year from now. Yet the key selling point of 802.11n is that it can stream high bandwidth files, including HD video. That's a shame for D-Link then, because that's exactly what its new plugs are designed to do.

Just a quick recap in case you don't know. Powerline networking uses the electricity cabling in your home as a network - critically, this means that powerline kit can be used to network in situations where wireless networks don't cut the mustard, such as in very tall houses or even to extend a network to a basement. And, of course, it removes the need to trail wires anywhere. You can also use powerline throughout your house, providing you stick to the same mains loop.

Still standards

Despite the fact that powerline adaptors from different manufacturers aren't designed to work together, they can if they use the same standard - much like wireless networks. D-Link's adaptors conform to the DS2 standard (www.ds2.es), but in reality this is meaningless - if you're going to set up a power line network we always recommend all your kit is from the same manufacturer.

As you would expect, the plugs are easy to set up. Power line is designed to be simple. Just plug in, connect the Ethernet cables and install a software utility on one PC. The software part of the process - currently incompatible with Vista - configures the plugs and makes sure they have the same password, ensuring security, which has previously been perceived as a problem in the past.

Such perceptions are misguided, since although there have been scare stories about plug networks being accessible to your neighbours, a simple password is enough to prevent any problems and make sure the signals along your electricity cables are encrypted.

As an aside, the LED indicators on the plugs are simple yet effective. Most other power line kit doesn't provide this, and it's surprising just how hard it is to diagnose problems if you have no visual indication that your plug has either not detected any other plugs or, alternatively, doesn't even detect that it's connected to the Ethernet port on your PC.

Speed issues

This kit has a cited speed of 200Mbps, but as with wireless, don't be misguided by such absurd figures. On our first attempt we got around 24Mbps of real-world throughput from the network and thereafter we pushed it to get around 34Mbps.

These figures sound surprisingly low, but they highlight one of the major issues with this kind of networking - your network is only as good as your home wiring. And ours would, apparently, provide the Electrician of the Year with a real test. With old homes, you can expect your network to take a major bandwidth hit.

But there is a positive side to this. Our throughput figures are still good enough for all Internet streaming and multi-room net access. More crucially for our verdict, they're also good enough to push a 19.5Mbps MPEG2 HD file down our connection, though trying multiple streams didn't go too well.

If you're lucky, though, you may well find that in a new house you can get these plugs to push 70 to 80Mbps, so you'll be instantly able to watch two or even three HD streams over your network. Standard definition content transfers in multiple streams without difficulty and we were able to get three streams playing quite happily alongside each other.

While this isn't the most impressive performance, it shows that D-Link's plugs are more than adequate for basic home networking or HD streaming. At well over £100 for two plugs, powerline has a big problem in terms of cost-per-connection. You can buy more plugs, of course, but it'll cost you.

Once 802.11n has become more established in a year's time, it'll be nigh-on impossible to work out why you would want a kit like this. Even so, there are still a few months left when you may consider this worth buying.

Solwise Homeplug AV

tech.co.uk staff — 1180652400

Over in the world of wireless networking, 802.11n draft 2 has just been moved one step up the bureaucratic ladder towards final ratification. Woo! That means another six or so months to wait before it's finally ready. Tired of hanging around? We have the ideal alternative...

Using the 240v ring main in your home to transfer data is nothing new. The first adapters which had a male electrical socket on one side and a female Ethernet port on the other came out almost a decade ago. Up until now, though, results have been a little flaky and no better than wireless.

When you take into account the downsides of powerline networking, it's always made sense to stick with WiFi. Or better yet, run a long Ethernet cable down the stairs. HomePlug AV, though, is capable of up to 200Mbps. Solwise's adapters cost about the same as a WiFi setup.

Best of all, though, they beat 802.11n WiFi for gaming. To top it off, a 25MB zip file took over a minute to transfer between PCs over wireless n. Using HomePlug AV it was less than ten seconds.

There's still a strong case for choosing wireless - especially if you like to wander around with your laptop. But gamers and media-streamers would do well to give HomePlug AV system some thought.

Belkin Switch2

tech.co.uk staff — 1157065200

The Belkin Switch2 is a networking box for anyone wanting to view two Macs through a single monitor. Both Macs can be on at the same time; the switch simply divides the signal so you can choose which Mac to view.

When you want to switch the display to show the desktop of the other Mac, just push the button on the front on the Switch2 and the other Mac's signal is displayed. It's all very easy to set up. There are powered USB ports for a keyboard, mouse and a headphone jack, and these cut in to work on either Mac when the switch button is pressed.

The unit's shell apes the form of a Mac mini and it's designed to stack under one - which it does perfectly. But this doesn't mean it'll only work with Mac minis; in fact, a Switch2 will link up any other Mac or PC, although you might need to buy a VGA adaptor, depending on the port configuration on your machine. These adaptors ship with Mac minis, so spare adaptors don't come in the Switch2 box.

Thankfully, this hardware doesn't require any software installation at all, but you will need to coordinate the resolution and display settings of your two Macs so that they display the same-sized desktop. As far as configuration goes, that's about it.

The controls are all on the front of the switch box, which has a touch-sensitive front panel. On the right-hand side is a button for switching Mac signals; to the left are other basic function buttons for raising and lowering volume, muting and ejecting discs.

If you have a couple of Macs and only one monitor, this is a useful piece of kit. Instead of buying two cheap monitors, you could roll your resources into one decent model, such as an Apple Cinema Display. Or, if you buy a new Mac, with a Switch2 you needn't buy a new monitor to run both your old and new machines at the same time. You can simply view both on your existing display.