Home PNA "Phoneline Networking" Round Up

The driver software installed without incident, as did the Internet sharing software, a shareware version of Midcore Software's Midpoint proxy server, Midpoint Lite. While installing the software you are told about all the great features of Midpoint, including information caching, content control, usage accounting, and a whole host of other wonderful gee-gaws. Unfortunately, none of them are available in the version that comes with the D-Link cards. You have to pay about $150 to get a 5-user license from Midcore in order to take advantage of all Midpoint has to offer.

The only thing you get with Midpoint Lite is simple Internet proxy. But not simple in terms of configuration. Midpoint Lite is the only one of the three software packages that requires manual browser proxy configuration.

If you wanted to use a separate FTP client, Usenet client, etc. they would also need to be configured. The manual that comes with the software does a pretty good job of leading you through the configuration, but there are a few typos that make for a lot of fiddling around before it works (and we've configured proxy servers before). There are a lot of available services and ports that can be mapped within this software, but there is no facility to customize, or add any that aren't present. For instance, you won't be able to use ICQ through Midpoint Lite.

MidPoint Screen Shot 1

MidPoint Screen Shot 2

MidPoint Screen Shot 3

Warranty and Tech Support

The D-Link product comes with free, unlimited tech support and a lifetime warranty. The tech support is available by email, web, or a long-distance (not toll-free) number. We called the tech support number in order to check on the quality of the support, and found it to be quite good. The only snag was that we had to wait for a call-back, which came a couple of hours later, to get the answers we were looking for. These warranty and support terms aren't the best of the three products, but they are a close second.