Netgear ships home theater Internet kit
updated 03:00 pm EDT, Mon August 10, 2009
Netgear outs XAVB1004
Netgear has released its planned powerline networking kit designed for home theater enthusiasts. The simply-titled Home Theater Internet Connection Kit will hook up to four devices with Ethernet ports, including gaming consoles, Blu-ray players, HDTVs and multimedia boxes like the Apple TV to the Internet via a home network. The powerline connections can be as fast as 200Mbps and can stream HD video with little buffering or hiccups.
The standard kit ships with a Powerline AV Adapter with 4-port Ethernet Switch and one Powerline AV Ethernet Adapter. Energy usage is reduced thanks to sleep modes for both the adapters and connected devices, and users get a chance to set priority bandwidth allocation to a specific device depending on the port they connect it to thanks to a port-based Quality of Service feature. The network supports single-button protection to lock down the network without manually setting passwords.
Netgear's kit is now available and costs $180.
