I’ve been geekdreaming again about ways I could get my neighborhood connected. The thought of creating one, big neighborhood network has been appealing for a long time.

Robert Cringley, the computer columnist, is a genius. His column on neighborhood multimedia servers has me exploring what it would take to build one. The first challenge I face is how to network the neighborhood. WiFi might have the range, but its all dependent on the placement of antennas. Some neighbors might consider that an eyesore, which I can understand.

Then I saw a sales circular in today’s paper offering a Netgear Powerline WiFi extender. To put it in Fark parlance, WiFi is old and busted, but Ethernet-over-powerlines is hot and new. I poked around more and found that, yes, Cringley has covered this, too. His article called “Ever Hear of a HomePlug network? You Will” ran almost three years ago!

The HomePlug networking gear turns ordinary home electrical wiring into a giant Ethernet segment. The bridge equipment encrypts traffic using a 56-bit DES key, which can keep your packets secure. And security is a good thing, since the HomePlug signals reach all the way out to the electrical transformer servicing your home, and from there on to all the other homes that transformer services. In other words, your network is shared with 6-10 of your nearest neighbors.

But that’s also a good thing, since it allows a super-cheap WAN to be built between surrounding homes! It may be the perfect medium for my wild and crazy networked neighborhood idea.

The only drawback is that the speed limit for version 1.0 of HomePlug is 14Mbs. That’s pretty modest by today’s wired standards, but considering cable modem connections are 3Mbs down, and 802.11b is 11Mbs on a good day, its not bad for a WAN. The good news is that the next version of HomePlug, dubbed HomePlug AV, will increase speeds to 100Mbs.

So let me say again: Cringley is a genius. If you want to know what I’ll be spending my tinker time doing, read his column.

Now, time to go get my neighborhood connected!