There have been various attempts to use the mains wiring in homes and offices for computer networking, as an alternative both to running wires all over the place and the hassles of wireless networks.

Early problems with spikes caused by fridges and boilers seem to have been overcome and the latest entry into the fray is Sling Media, makers of the excellent Slingbox television re-broadcaster, with the Slinglink Turbo.

The trend towards providing no documentation for computer gear continues unabated and the Slinglink Turbo comes with the briefest of Getting Started slips. If it doesn’t work, you’re pretty much on your own, with only the website to help. In our tests, though, it could hardly have been simpler to set up and use.

You plug each Slinglink Turbo box – the device is another oddly angular little box, like the Slingbox – directly into a mains socket (the Getting Started slip warns against using multi-way power blocks or surge suppressors) and connect a cable from the PC or router to the box’s network socket. That’s it: you should then have a network connection, with no extra cabling.

The device is compatible with the Homeplug standard, which means it will work with other Homeplug devices such as those from Devolo and Netgear.

To test out the Slinglink, we connected one box to our router and the other to a notebook computer in a different room, but on the same ring main. We then copied a 1GB collection of files of various types and sizes, from a desktop PC to the notebook. This took just under 11 minutes, giving an average speed of 1.5Mbits/sec.

For comparison, we copied the basket to another PC on the same network, but with the two hard-wired together via a standard network cable. It finished in just under three minutes, a speed of 5.7Mbits/sec. So, the Slinglink is not much more than a quarter of the speed of a conventional wired network, but that may not be a problem in a home environment. It’s still fast enough to shift media around a house, after all.

Slinglink Turbo is part of a range of kit that makes good use of its mains-based connection. At the moment, the only parts available in the UK are the Slinglink and the aforementioned Slingbox, which redirects and streams TV programming from cable, satellite or PVR to any PC fitted with a Slinglink.

Vista compatible: N/A