A friend was late for an appointment during CES, so I stopped by to let them know she'd be late. Lucky for me. The product was Corinex's GameNet, a plug-and-play high speed solution that uses electrical wiring in any building. They were kind enough to send me one after CES and I've spent the last six weeks putting it through its paces.

Billed as a "solution for game systems" it does work fantastically for an Xbox 360, PS2 or any other game system, but quite frankly, that isn't what made it most convenient for me. The pick-up-and-go nature of it just rocks. I'll back up a bit.

I live in an old apartment building. Some of the plugs — the ones not in the kitchen — don't have ground connectors on them. To make matters more interesting, there was a significant fire here about a year ago that took out two buildings and caused an electrical surge through my apartment that blew out my TV, lamp, and PC (but surprisingly not my X360 or laptop). What I'm trying to get across is — I have crappy wiring.

To add insult to injury, the local DSL provider refuses to maintain the lines from the central hub to each individual building. They're too old. It's the responsibility of the building maintenance.

When I received the GameNet package (which contains two of Corinex's AV200 Powerline Ethernet Wall Mount units) I did what every good consumer does — I opened the box, ignored the instructions and plugged them in. My DSL modem had been going wonky for some time — it couldn't find a DNS to save its life but of course, my carrier wouldn't believe a grrl — so I expected this to be interesting.

GameNet into wall socket; DSL into into GameNet. Grabbing a Cat-5 cable and the second GameNet unit I ran around the apartment plugging it in periodically just to see if I got signal. It never failed. (I also saw no DNS issues — but that's probably just a coincidence.) I especially liked that I could close my bedroom door and not deal with signal degradation as I had been accustomed to through Wi-fi.

However, I moved across the courtyard to a new apartment the next week. My tests would have to wait.

My next use was at a friend's in San Jose. Being a game designer he's fantastic with code and absolutely worthless with hardware. Rather than ask him to figure out his wireless login I ran the modem to the Wi-fi router and the router to the GameNet unit. I could again, plug in anywhere in the house with ease.

The next day I was in a developer's office. Rather than deal with finding their Wi-fi, I went through the same process. The portability of the units became their greatest asset immediately.

GDC showed the same utility. After 4 annoying days of trying to share a single b-speed access point on the 4^th floor with 200 other people I snuck downstairs one evening and plugged a unit into the business center modem. Four floors and 13 rooms to the south and I was rockin' for the rest of the evening.

Finally, six weeks after receiving my GameNet pair, I could try them out on my Xbox 360 and other consoles. Set up is still simple as can be. Modem to router, router to GameNet unit, console to second GameNet unit. If I wanted to switch to another console I just unplugged one cable and plugged another in.

If I have a complaint it is with the physical casing. The plugs are just a little too low to comfortably fit a 3-prong plug in the second outlet. A centimeter higher would have been perfect. You can wiggle it but it just doesn't seat as well as I'd like.

Essentially, each unit is an fairly standard ethernet to ethernet-over-powerline bridge. (The gory details are on the datasheet for the AV200s, if you're interested.) Sending communication signals across a power line isn't a particularly new idea. Electricity utility companies have been using this type of technology to communicate with their remote equipment without extra wires for decades, and I remember sharing a printer with a similar (but much slower!) box of tricks back in the early 90s. But, the technology has gotten faster, more reliable and easier to configure over the years, and it's now worth consideration by the average consumer.

With a going rate of around $135 I don't know on my budget if I could afford to buy them to start. However, now that I have a set I can't imagine not having them. I won't travel again without them — they are far too useful, have gotten me out of several tight spots and the speed is fantastic. I've yet to experience a slow down. I am quite simply, happy.