Solwise Piggy6

The biggest drawback of using HomePlug devices to turn your home’s electrical wiring into a ready-made network is that it uses up a socket. Solwise’s handy Pass Through adapters go some way to solving this, but they don’t help with the rat’s nest of cables that sit behind most PCs and home-entertainment centres. Now, all your extension lead-related HomePlug problems are solved with the introduction of the Piggy6.

Although it looks like a cremated tortoise, the Piggy6 houses six electrical sockets and three Ethernet ports. Stick it behind your TV and there are enough sockets to power your various players and devices, as well as hook up your games consoles, media players and any other gubbins you may have networked to a router located somewhere else in the house. It uses the 200Mbps HomePlug standard so it should work with other Intellon-based HomePlugs, including the full Solwise range. And you get all this from a single wall socket.

A few weeks ago, using HomePlug was a question of sacrificing wall sockets, even if you did use pass-through adapters. These issues have vanished with the Piggy6, which could be just the device to bring HomePlug into the big time and pull Wi-Fi’s many enthusiasts back to the wire.

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