Powerline Networking - anybody had experience?

[m_s]

I am about to install a shared broadband connection in a very large house - it consists of an office in the basement, a new student library on the ground floor, and then two floors of accommodation above that.  At the moment, there is a wireless connection, but its reception is patchy in the basement - the router is on the first floor, which serves the bedrooms very well (which has been the main community of users, so that has been find until now).  It seems to me that powerline networking might be a really elegant solution to this situation - I would keep the wireless going, which would be fine through most of the house, and certainly okay in the new library, which is directly underneath the router, and we could extend it to the basement via the powerline connection... and the desktop users could ditch their wireless cards, since they need to be plugged in anyway.

Has anybody used this technology before?  Is there anything I need to know?  Or is this just a dumb idea and I don't realise it?  Thanks!

[mouser]

i think you should seriously consider how much trouble it would be to use normal ethernet wiring and only devitate to powerline if you absolutely have to.  annecdotal stories i hear both about wireless and alternatives like powerline lead me to always recommend to people to just bite the bullet and user ethernet.

[m_s]

I've had good experiences with wireless, and really bad ones with ethernet!  But that's always going to be the way, isn't it - some things work some of the time in some circumstances for some people, and sometimes they don't.  I'm thinking I might buy in a setup for my own home setup, where I've my main laptop connected to adsl and two other machines that it would be good to share with occasionally...  At least this way I can get a sense of it in operation - it does appear to be much cheaper than wiring the whole building for ethernet.