Will have two areas in the house (living room and master bedroom, perhaps more in the future) that will need data connectivity: mainly for DirecTV On Demand and Netflix through a Blu-Ray player. Thus, each area will need at least two powerline ethernet ports.

Any recommendations on powerline ethernet adapters (preferably with 3-4 ports) is greatly appreciated.

Western Digital WD Livewire Powerline AV Network Kit
Should be under $100 a pop and 4 ports. Sounds like it meets your needs.

The new generation is already out. We run ethernet to the living room through the power line, used to have the old 200Mbit/s units but in January I replaced them with Netgear's AV500 units. The specs say 500Mbit/s but that's a) marketing and b) link-rate rate. But one should expect 2-3x increase in performance.

I'm currently getting 200M down/100M up link rates. With the 200M units it was kind-of slow for e.g. NAS access, now it's finally ok.

There is also 4-port gigabit model available (XAV5004).

The problem with powerline is you are susceptible to interference from your neighbours (unless you have very expensive isolation gear). They install a new box, and your error rate goes up 3 orders of magnitude. Bottom line is that it is never a reliable system unless you know whom your neighbours are and can control them

I've yet to run into this, unless its an apartment thing.
House wise I've seen them not work in new additions such as a basement or work shop. So how its going to traverse a wire to the pole then back down to your neighbor and cause issues...

Dell has a 200mbps powerline kit for $50 today...

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/p...ynote_irrank=0

It's gotten very good reviews on Newegg.

I'll also buy this for the living room media center...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16833156311

After my experiences with it (dropping video/etc) I recommend not using it. You can buy the gigabit version and see 18mbit out of it in a relatively new place.

In the end I went with a wireless bridge. I have a netgear 300N router and a 300N bridge/repeater running on channel 11. The repeater has a 4 port switch on the back of it and I ONLY use this wireless channel for that bridge. Anything else (iphone/laptop/etc) runs on channel 1 on a G router. I was successful at getting my Wii playing SD netflix, the Bluray player streaming HD netflix, and my WDTV playing a 1080P stream off of the network concurrently.

Note that there are 4 networks in the area on channel 1, 9(!) on channel 6, and 3 on channel 11 that I can see from my living room.

Hardware used:
Netgear WN2000RPT (repeater/bridge)
Netgear WNR3500L (router)
Linksys WRT54G (router running dd-wrt as an access point)

Hope this helps!

You can easily get interference from one house to another even with two house - pole runs. In a small number of locations ISPs even use the powerline ethernet technologies to provide ISP service from the pole to houses.

Great link writeup on powerline networking:
http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/building...rline-network/

Have any of you ran into problems running powerline adapters across circuit breakers?

across breakers, I didn't really think that was possible?

that said, I haven't found any interference problems in about ten locations I have used or installed homeplug solutions in, including large MFU in Chicago and NYC and homes from late 1800's to today.

I'm not using any of the "400mb" solutions, finding that the 100-200 stated units work fine for moving files and HD video around the LAN.

As I have noted before, I find the netgear solutions in my experience present the most reliable and stable implementations, having compared them to belking, dlink, trendnet and a couple of other off brands

Wow. Never thought powerline ethernet would totally screw with my wireless keyboard/mouse. Any suggestions on how to fix that?

Huh, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense? Are you using and RF or Bluetooth mouse? Even then, it should not interfere. I have all sorts of wireless devices with about three types of powerline solutions, no issues.

Using RF.

The powerline adapter was the only thing I added since last night. Swapped out batteries and resynced with the receiver multiple times to no avail. As soon as I unplugged the adapter from the wall, keyboard and mouse work fine.

Using Google, I found a few threads about people with the same issue, but it seems to be a very rare occurrence.

What is the powerline unit you are using? Does it have a WIFI radio as well, some do?

Is the mouse/keyboard receiver plugged into the wall in some way?

maybe try setting up the adaptors with the password feature?

Naturally, I plug the adapter back in and everything is totally fine.

What a very strange episode.